This is obviously as meaningless as it gets, since it's an average on really a random set of benchmarks. But it generally means we're getting faster (with number 7 not meaning anything in particular)

Would love to see run-once, latency, and memory benchmarks. The benchmarks don't show many of the GC improvements, or track how quickly the JIT works for example.

This is yet again, a multi-month project that I simply don't have budget for. Would love to see a business model where writing such parts would be somehow monetizable

Ok, some things that I've done...

Get a high paying python contract, and then donate some proceeds to other cheaper developers. You should be able to get $200K-$300K as a contractor for one years work (or more).

Somewhere in big data, finance, games, or other places that pay for performance - that also use python a lot.

Once you are embedded, it is much easier to do sales for other pypy related contracts. eg. if one of your team were at facebook, dropbox, or google - it may have been your team who got those VM projects. This is a sales tactic that many consulting shops use.

A sponsorship approach seems to work for some FOSS projects. As does conferences.

Helping students with grant proposals can also bring in a lot of effort. This is something the pypy project does of course. But just mentioning it for other people who may read.

If your goal is helping the pypy project these could all work. For me, I've used these approaches for FOSS projects with some success.

speed.pypy as a service could probably be sold. For example as a devpi project that others could use. Reduce server costs by helping the development team speed up their code. It's got a pain point, a cost saving, and pretty graphs.

it's all A LOT more difficult if you don't live in America.

I actually have some examples that run faster in CPython. However, that's mostly idiomatic -- the code can be written to favor one interpreter or the other in terms of speed.