This is so cool, I have dreamt about doing this but wouldn't know where to start. Do you have a plan for releasing it? What is your background? Was there anything that was way more difficult than you thought it would be? Or anything that was easier than you expected?
Right now, the plan is to present it at PyCon first (next month) and then publish more about the internals afterward. Long-term, I'm keeping an open mind, not sure yet.
My background is in high-frequency trading (HFT), high-performance computing (HPC), systems programming, and networking. I didn't come from HW background — or at least, I wasn't when I started — but coming from the software side gave me a different perspective on how dynamic languages could be made much more efficient at the hardware level.
Difficult - adapting the Python execution model to my needs in a way that keeps it self-coherent if it makes sense. This is still fluid and not finalized...
Easy - Not sure if categorize as easy, but more surprising: The current implementation is rather simple and elegant (at least I think so :-) ), so still no special advanced CPU design stuff (branch prediction, super-scalar, etc). So even now, I'm getting a huge improvement over CPython or MicroPython VMs in the known python bottlenecks (branchings, function calls, etc)
Alright well those dots are begging me to ask what they mean, or at least one specific story for the nerds :-)
Long-term, I'm keeping an open mind, not sure yet.
Well please consider open source, even if you charge for access to your open source code. And even if you don't go open source, atleast make it cheap enough that a solo developer could afford to build on it without thinking.