What is with the estimated costs? Are they looking for corporate sponsors? I've never seen a FOSS project do such a thing when discussing future plans.
The task is huge and it's unlikely that it will be
completed shortly based only on volunteer work, so we
came up with the following proposal, which splits the
work into several steps and sub-steps, togheter with an
estimate of how much money is needed to complete each
one.I guess my point, in keeping with the parent, is that you'd expect Google to be interested in sustaining a team looking into performance improvements in an important part of their runtime longer-term, but that didn't happen.
Edit: On an unrelated note, it's good fun to take a look at http://speed.pypy.org/ and consider how close the averaged 4.5x speedup of PyPy trunk over CPython is to the original "make it five times faster" goal of Unladden Swallow.
Partly it sounds like performance-critical code at Google tends to get written in a lower level language instead, so Python performance isn't as critical, even though they use it quite a bit.
Agree that it'd be great if they helped out the PyPy team though, since it's showing such great promise and has some pretty impressive numbers already.