alt Hacker NewsFabrice Bellard is widely considered one of the most productive and versatile programmers alive:
- FFmpeg: https://bellard.org
- QEMU: https://bellard.org/qemu/
- JSLinux: https://bellard.org/jslinux/
- TCC: https://bellard.org/tcc/
- QuickJS: https://bellard.org/quickjs/
Legendary.
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He's also built a closed-source LLM inference engine, which he's been maintaining since the GPT-2 days: https://bellard.org/ts_server/ and https://textsynth.com/
He's also won the International Obfuscated C Code Contest 3 times.
Don't forget his LZEXE from the good old DOS days which was an excellent piece of work at the time.
And that’s just his open source work.
Always interesting when people as talented as Bellard manage to (apparently) never write a "full-on" GUI-fronted application, or more specifically, a program that sits between a user with constantly shifting goals and workflows and a "core" that can get the job done.
I would not want to dismiss or diminish by any amount the incredible work he has done. It's just interesting to me that the problems he appears to pick generally take the form of "user sets up the parameters, the program runs to completion".
Whenever someone says there's no such thing as a 10x programmer, I point them to Fabrice and they usually change their mind.
Don't forget his LLM based text compression software that won awards.
Guy is a genius. I hope he tries Rust someday
At this point I'm convinced that they're not a 'real person' and the 'Fabrice' is an operational code name for a very mature hacker collective.
Real people have to sleep at some point!
Wikipedia doesn't list any honours awarded by the French Government. Nor do I see anything from ACM. Definitely overdue some official recognition.
Funny how people know Fabrice for all the software stuff but none of the hardware antics:
played with implementing analog modem DSP in software in 1999 (linmodem is ~50-80% there, sadly never finished)
probably leading to
played with implementing SDR (again DSP) using VGA output to transmit DVB-T/NTSC/PAL in 2005
probably leading to
Amarisoft SDR 5G base station, commercial product started in 2012 - his current job https://www.amarisoft.com/company/about-us
For real. The GOAT is at it again!
For all the praise he's receiving, I think his web design skills have gone overlooked. bellard.org is fast, responsive and presents information clearly. Actually I think the fancier the website, the shittier the software. Examples: Tarsnap - minimal website, brilliant software. Discord - Whitespacey, animation-heavy abomination of a website. Software: hundreds of MB of JS slop, government wiretap+botnet for degenerates.
The math checks out.
For all the praise he gets here, few seem interested in his methods: writing complete programs, based on robust computer science, with minimal dependencies and tooling.