Linked in that thread I found an insightful comment by @stevengj that seems relevant here, in response to replacing LLVM with a hand-rolled compiler à la Zig.
I agree, and I don’t foresee the Julia compiler team writing their own LLVM replacement; it sure doesn’t seem like they are currently starved for work, especially with 1.12 around the corner. The case of TPDE, though, seems to be exactly the case where we can potentially piggyback off of someone else’s priorities.
In truth, however, I don’t know if this would be a case of “just recompile Julia with TPDE-LLVM” (feasible) or rather a “someone has to start maintaining a new code-generation branch suitable for TPDE-LLVM”, which most likely nobody can commit to long-term at the moment. I would still be interested to hear comments on that.
Finally, of course new funding is usually coupled with new potential applications, and I do believe that a drastically faster -O1 compiler could unlock new industry or research opportunities.