if only Ada would have ever had Rust’s community! I come from a Pascal background originally and wouldn’t have minded that.

Well… Ada has a very active community, one of my preferred channels is a google group

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/comp.lang.ada

Take a look if you are curious about it, and welcome.

One thing I would point out, is that, according to https://blog.rust-lang.org/2018/11/27/Rust-survey-2018.html, Rust has only 9.6% of users with experience longer than 3 years. In Ada community it’s quite common to find people with far 20 years, some even with 30 yeas of experiencie, still active. I might say my 12 Ada years would put me in a baby chair. A high number of new people is sure awesome, but a good number of more experienced people tells a lot about the maturity of the community and helps a lot in the more complex discussions.

But the lack of popularity of Ada—at least in open source development—makes that bindings are usually badly maintained. Unless you’re working on something that is entirely built from scratch that’s going to give you a lot more work.

I would not say so. Ada is very popular among military systems, and it’s been widely used in tons of critical systems. For open source projects you could say it is not as popular as Rust, but it is changing. Still there are some initiatives to turn more popular for these projects, eg, the hackster Make with Ada contest

Hackster.io Make with Ada Build software that matters. With AdaCore.

Also, according to TIOBE index, Ada is almost as popular in use as Rust, in the 36th position where Rust is in 35th, with the same score.

https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

Besides formal work, I personally have also used Ada even for my private and public projects. No problem with other languages, but Ada’s way for me is very intuitive (for the type of project I like to do for myself), so I just have to think in the system as the language flows. Bindings are also quite easy, when I don’t want to implement from scratch, no problem in using a C/C++ code.