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A natural question I've pondered from time to time is whether Fabrice Bellard is really a time traveler from a more advanced civilization in the future, sent ba

by cs702 5y ago

A natural question I've pondered from time to time is whether Fabrice Bellard is really a time traveler from a more advanced civilization in the future, sent back in time to show us, mere mortals, what humankind will be capable of in the future. If this sounds far-fetched, consider that he has created not only BPG, but FFMPEG, QEMU, LibBF, SoftFP, TinyEMU, a software implementation of 4G/LTE, a PC emulator in Javascript, the TCC compiler, TinyGL, LZEXE, a tiny program for computing the biggest known prime number, and NNCP, a clever lossless data compression system using deep neural networks (transformers, to be precise). And that's just a partial list of his successful projects. Any of these projects, on its own, would be considered a notable achievement for an ordinary human being. Source: https://bellard.org https://bellard.org

nix23 5y ago
https://bellard.org/mersenne.html https://bellard.org/mersenne.html Absolutely astonishing!! A bit like the Bobby Fisher of programming ;)
CharlesW 5y ago
I found his Wikipedia entry interesting as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard
mark-r 5y ago
You forgot my favorite - JSLinux, Linux running in your browser.
- userbinator 5y ago
  The comment did mention PC emulator in JavaScript. ...and he has also written a JS interpreter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20411154 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20411154
eternityforest 5y ago
We should have a programmer's hall of fame for people like this!
- api 5y ago
  There really aren't enough awards or halls of fame in our field.
- m-p-3 5y ago
  The Hall of Fame should have his name.
mdp2021 5y ago
This just proves how the following has happened without many noticing: Fabrice Bellard has released an Artificial Neural Networks library, LibNC, "C Library for Tensor Manipulation" ( https://bellard.org/libnc/ https://bellard.org/libnc/ ). Similar to PyTorch, but in sheer C. It's the library behind that data compressor mentioned: we do not just have the compressor, he gave us the very AI tool. If that does not make one ecstatic... Summary of features: > * C API ; * Small library, no external dependency, available for Linux and Windows ; * Define-by-run automatic differentiation engine (same idea as PyTorch) ; * High performance for both CPU (x86) and GPU (CUDA support). Optimized support of float32 and bfloat16 data types ; * CPU backend optimized for inference and small batch sizes ; * Optimized for online learning (i.e. simultaneous evaluation and training) using LSTM or Transformer models ; * Fully deterministic: return the same results at each run ; * Reproducible results (CPU backend only): return the same results regardless the CPU brand and OS

by cs702 5y ago

nix23 5y ago

https://bellard.org/mersenne.html https://bellard.org/mersenne.html Absolutely astonishing!! A bit like the Bobby Fisher of programming ;)

CharlesW 5y ago

I found his Wikipedia entry interesting as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard

mark-r 5y ago

You forgot my favorite - JSLinux, Linux running in your browser.

userbinator 5y ago
The comment did mention PC emulator in JavaScript. ...and he has also written a JS interpreter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20411154 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20411154

eternityforest 5y ago

We should have a programmer's hall of fame for people like this!

api 5y ago
There really aren't enough awards or halls of fame in our field.
m-p-3 5y ago
The Hall of Fame should have his name.

mdp2021 5y ago

This just proves how the following has happened without many noticing: Fabrice Bellard has released an Artificial Neural Networks library, LibNC, "C Library for Tensor Manipulation" ( https://bellard.org/libnc/ https://bellard.org/libnc/ ). Similar to PyTorch, but in sheer C. It's the library behind that data compressor mentioned: we do not just have the compressor, he gave us the very AI tool. If that does not make one ecstatic... Summary of features: > * C API ; * Small library, no external dependency, available for Linux and Windows ; * Define-by-run automatic differentiation engine (same idea as PyTorch) ; * High performance for both CPU (x86) and GPU (CUDA support). Optimized support of float32 and bfloat16 data types ; * CPU backend optimized for inference and small batch sizes ; * Optimized for online learning (i.e. simultaneous evaluation and training) using LSTM or Transformer models ; * Fully deterministic: return the same results at each run ; * Reproducible results (CPU backend only): return the same results regardless the CPU brand and OS