I really wish Google would support PyPy. It'd be such a small amount of money for them to fund development. Given the PyPy team's demonstrable success and Google's otherwise strong commitment to Python I can't understand why they don't.
That Unladden Swallow seems to have died a quiet death in the end sure doesn't support the idea that Google is easy to truely commit to such efforts, though.
I thought the story was that the Unladden Swallow team had actually started expanding into new directions after walking away from LLVM disappointed, but the project then got cancelled from higher-up?
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.
