alt Hacker NewsI’ve never directly played with Ada but my understanding is that it was very much both.
Ada includes a number of critical abstractions that require either dynamic runtime code (slow runtime) or the proverbial sufficiently smart compiler (slow compile-time).
These were for good reasons, like safety and the need to define concurrent systems within the language. But they were too heavyweight for the commodity hardware of the era.
Nowadays, languages like Go, C++, Java, Rust, … have no trouble with similar abstractions because optimizers have gotten really good (particularly with inlining) and the hardware has cycles to spare.
I had to take some course that was something like "Programming Language Theory". As a result I had to look at the specifications for dozens of different programming languages. I remember looking at the features of some languages and scratching my head trying to figure out how some of this would ever be practically implemented by a compiler. Later on I found out lots of stuff is just implemented by a runtime anyways, which lead to me realize that those fancy language features are often better as a library.