At a minimum there'd have to have been a free-as-in-beer cross-platform compiler.

I think Ada had a brief chance to take off around 2000 when gnat was added to the main gcc distribution, but the GNU maintainer was also the head of Ada Core Technologies and had very little interest in making the free version of the compiler useful for general purpose programming.

I wrote a few small things using it, but the "ecosystem" just wasn't there, and there was nobody trying to coordinate a community that might have built it up.

Even calling libc functions that didn't correspond to anything in the Ada standard library was no fun at all.