$20K sounds very low for the effort and expertise that are demanded here in my opinion. It would be quite a steal to bring this to the same level as the state of the art (which, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe is dav1d?) for only that sum.
It's similar to job descriptions written for specific candidates they plan to hire. The question shouldn't be "why is this bounty so low?" but "what toolchain makes $20K reasonable for someone?"
Performance work in my experience has been largely organizational friction: running projects in various conditions, collecting evidence maintainers accept, maximizing that limited slice of attention people give my CLs, getting compiler improvements merged. These coordination tasks have become much easier to automate with LLMs (e.g., analyzing maintainer comments to understand cryptic 1 line feedback, what are they actually looking for, what do they mean).
My guess is there's an engineer who's either optimized their feedback cycle to under an hour through specialized tooling (more arrows) or is much better at finding the right signal the first time (more wood). I'd like to understand what tools enable that efficiency.
There is a reason for this sentence: > « The dav1d and rav1d decoders share the exact same low-level assembly code optimizations—you cannot modify this assembly ».
So, it, kind of, makes the work easier, but it stills very complex I think.
I’m sure both the dav1d and dav1d communities would appreciate improvements to the assembly code, but the goal of this contest is to improve the rust implementation only.