The problem with PyPy, which I'm a huge fan of BTW, is it's on life-support. The only reason the past couple major versions were released was due to a few small companies or individuals directly implementing the updates themselves. That's my understanding at least. It's disheartening because I've been primarily using PyPy for 5 years, advocated for it, and was looking into contributing more to it before finding out about its state.
Perhaps if the money which was spent on the built-in JIT had been spent on PyPy we'd be somewhere.
PyPy wasn't great for me because its startup time interfered with the main usecase I wanted it for in one instance and in another there bugs that made it not quite compatible enough. Money could solve the bug issue.
On the other hand I did get pygame working with it at one point and that seemed like a nice scenario.
PyPy's problem with slow startup is, in principle, easily fixable.
When it was created, PyPy did not seek to optimise startup performance. Instead, its aim was steady-state performance of JITed code, and it succeeded handsomely. A conceptually simple fix would be to optimise traces in one processor core, while the interpreter runs in another. Once when the trace is finalised, does interpretation stop and switch to native execution. But PyPy is currently a sequential system and making it parallel, while conceptually easy, is a lot of work and needs a rewrite of the whole system. But, for better or worse, the PyPy team does not have the resources to do this.
The other of PyPy's big performance issues (Python code using a lot of FFI calls via a suboptimal FFI) is also, in principle, easily fixable. But this is a social problem: the Python community would have to move towards better FFIs.
In principle, it would also be easy to fix PyPy's resource problem. I am not sure about the social problem ...
> What would have been really nice is if the $1M/y in funding the PSF rejected due to ideological purity could have been reallocated to PyPy.
It would certainly have been nice if the Trump administration had not retroactively obliged the NSF to add ideological constraints to its funding parameters which conflicted with the PSF's mission, so that money that had already been allocated by the NSF to the PSF could not be granted.
I'm not sure what the process is by which you purport that the money could have been redirected to PyPy, but I assure you that it exists only in your imagination.
