This man is a wizard. You can also thank him for ffmpeg and qemu. A company I worked for once tried to hire him as a consultant because he had implemented an LTE BTS in software. Is there anything he hasn't done?
EDIT: tombert beat me to it[0] by a couple minutes.
yes! he has been one of my favorite programmers over all these years. so happy that he continues to dispel the 10x programmer myth. at least, as far as i am concerned. we should all take note. it's less about productivity but more about focus and hard work.
this project seems to have started in 2017. from a quick glance at the code, they used c (his favorite language) -- which by the way people are still there convincing us not to use. many of us would have been discouraged, distracted, or simply fazed by the pace of our field.
There's at least two years of work in there as Fabrice Bellard's side project. This would mean about ~10-15 man-years of full-time work for a small team of experienced engineers, which is about what it took for jerryscript:
Someone like him wouldn’t be billing by the hour, but rather as a portion of overall value created. For the kind of non-trivial jobs worth his time, six figures at least.
The problem with putting a $ figure on it is that people who create free software create emmense amounts of value but don't capture even a tiny fraction for themselves. OTOH to montize their genius they need to help corporates do things that are not neccesarily great for society. Also a coporate situation may hamper their genius, although at this level he probably gets to call the shots.
Also a lot of useless consultants would earn that much, as would people doing shady shit, as well as many talented people so the $ comparison is kind of insulting.
EDIT: tombert beat me to it[0] by a couple minutes.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20413498