Yes, Ada needs more love here. I think that Rust's main goals are already implemented with Ada (low-level, reliable, strong typing etc.). Plus that Ada is a proven work horse with existing tools and best practices. It just hasn't the C feeling they want in Rust.
My heart has a sweet spot for the Pascal family of languages and their strong typing, in regard to C and C++.
Ada suffered from lack of available cheap compilers back in the 80's, and like Turbo Pascal and Modula-2 it was a victim of UNIX's success, which had the sad side effect of promoting C for systems programming, with all security issues we have nowadays.
Now with the work of GNAT Core, and more security conscious developers, Ada seems to be getting new users, at least here in Europe as more universities adopt it. It is already a constant presence at FOSDEM in the last few years.
Yes, I wish that GNAT gets more adoption. Where appropriate I recommend Ada. It would be helpful to have some impressive and successful applications outside the high-integrity/reliability niche.
There are embedded systems being coded in Basic, Oberon, Lisp, Scheme and .NET.
Although those systems are usually 32 bit based. 8 and 16 bit systems are too small for those languages.