FWIW, the core Julia developers seem to be taking this more and more seriously, and AoT compilation to small binaries seems more of a "when" question than an "if" at this point. Open source development - without multi-million dollar support from outside - is unpredictable, but I wouldn't be surprised if a year from now, writing a restricted subset of Julia allowed you AoT compilation to reasonable binaries (and not something as restricted as StaticCompiler.jl requires, just avoiding some of the extreme dynamic features).
Boeing is probably interested in Julia for manufacturing optimization, so their interest is likely in improving the optimization ecosystem around JuMP [1], Optim [2], etc., and compiler improvements related to that.
But we can only guess from the outside, and it's ultimately upto JuliaHub to decide how to spend the money, so I'll cross my fingers and hope that this gets us AoT static compilation sooner!
13 million is substantial but not even close to the 100 million Modular got. Which really makes me wonder what Modular has been doing with that money, if they're still getting beat in benchmarks like this...
First of all, Mojo is quite new. Secondly, there might not be much CPU performance left on the table for that benchmark, no matter how much money you throw at it.
