Fabrice Bellard: Biography (2009) [pdf]

Publishing ffmpeg and QEMU in a five year span that also included winning IOCCC (twice!) is absolutely bonkers.

This biography includes more information than I've seen elsewhere about the legendary programmer, who's been discussed time and again on this forum.

Without being glib, I honestly wonder if Fabrice Bellard has started using any LLM coding tools. If he could be even more productive, that would be scary!

I doubt he is ideologically opposed to them, given his work on LLM compression [1]

He codes mostly in C, which I'm sure is mostly "memorized". i.e. if you have been programming in C for a few decades, you almost certainly have a deep bench of your own code that you routinely go back to / copy and modify

In most cases, I don't see an LLM helping there. It could be "out of distribution", similar to what Karpathy said about writing his end-to-end pedagogical LLM chatbot

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Now that I think of it, Bellard would probably train his own LLM on his own code! The rest of the world's code might not help that much :-)

He has all the knowledge to do that ... I could see that becoming a paid closed-source project, like some of his other ones [2]

[1] e.g. https://bellard.org/ts_zip/

[2] https://bellard.org/lte/

He did a few things since, notably 5G base stations using PC hardware, and some LLM stuff.

With his recent release of MicroQuickJS, and also prior work, he kind of has to do epic things. People expect that of him.

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(2009)

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Do we think Bellard got rich, like antirez?

While the guy is brilliant, I doubt he could fit the role of senior/staff/principal engineer in any one-level-below faang kind of company. Typically, these roles require good communication skills and working together with other engineers (which is really hard). So, while he's very good at the tech level, I think he primarily works alone? In that regard, it would be a very bad fit. I may be wrong, tho.