C and C++ are still used pretty frequently. I wouldn't say that they failed, but if someone wrote an application in Ada in 2025, I would find that a bit anachronistic.
I suppose that Nvidia's use of Ada and SPARK for self-driving vehicles is anachronistic:
https://www.eenewseurope.com/en/nvidia-drives-ada-and-spark-...
https://nvidia.github.io/spark-process/process/introduction....
Many languages have their great qualities. Whether or not they're outdated is a determination full of biases. Measure the language choice against resources and potential revenue. I'd be happy to write an app in Ada to proclaim its advantages as a sales pitch.
I just don't see Ada used a lot anymore. This isn't a value judgement on it being "good" or "bad", lots of bad languages (like PHP) end up getting very popular, and lots of cool languages (like Idris) kind of languish in obscurity. Don't mistake me saying popularity is proper metric for how "good" something is.
When I say "anachronistic", I don't mean it as a bad thing either, just that it's not used a lot anymore. I've literally never heard of anyone writing an Ada application in the last twenty years outside blogs on HN.
One thing I do believe: the quality of software from MSFT has gone down, in part because their business model has gone from providing products to monetizing the users. Their products are just stagnant honeypots to collect data. This is opening a door for the small time dev to try new things, maybe with unpopular toolchains. I've got something that would be great for highlighting Ada's mission critical rep. Price and value discovery aren't dead (yet).
It's still a very modern language which is missing very little in that niche. It's only missing adoption.
I have high hopes for Rust in this space. Using C is fine, using C++ is madness, using Ada is good but fewer available devs.
Rust also solves a lot of issues with C++ and generally, once you get past the "fighting the borrow checker" to the "working with the borrow checker" phase has insanely good ergonomica, safety mechanisms and features. Additionally Rust has momentum right now.
