5 ms·

Fabrice Bellard is widely considered one of the most productive and versatile programmers alive: - FFmpeg: https://bellard.org https://bellard.org - QEMU: htt

by ddtaylor 10mo ago

Fabrice Bellard is widely considered one of the most productive and versatile programmers alive: - FFmpeg: https://bellard.org https://bellard.org - QEMU: https://bellard.org/qemu/ https://bellard.org/qemu/ - JSLinux: https://bellard.org/jslinux/ https://bellard.org/jslinux/ - TCC: https://bellard.org/tcc/ https://bellard.org/tcc/ - QuickJS: https://bellard.org/quickjs/ https://bellard.org/quickjs/ Legendary.

bborud 10mo ago
And that’s just his open source work.
justmarc 10mo ago
Don't forget his LZEXE from the good old DOS days which was an excellent piece of work at the time.
- sedatk 10mo ago
  Self-decompressing executables felt like magic to me at the time. Fantastic work, overall.
  - phatskat 10mo ago
    Reading about APE similarly sparkled me - the amount of ingenuity and sheer amazingness (if not perhaps a touch of depravity) that goes into these kinds of endeavors is awe inspiring.
- lioeters 10mo ago
  I remember LZEXE from those olden days. When I discovered the author of FFmpeg and QEMU also created LZEXE, I was so impressed. I've been using his software for my entire computing career. It's similar to the respect I have for the work of Anders Hejlsberg, who created Turbo Pascal, with which I learned to program; and also C# and TypeScript.
vatsachak 10mo ago
Don't forget his LLM based text compression software that won awards. Guy is a genius. I hope he tries Rust someday
- hsaliak 10mo ago
  peak hacker news comment lol
  - vatsachak 10mo ago
    I've only been here for a month. I guess I'm learning well
- elevation 10mo ago
  Fabrice, if you're reading this, please consider replacing Rust instead with your own memory safe language. The design intent of Rust is a powerful idea, and Rust is the best of its class, but the language itself is under-specified[1] which prevents basic, provably-correct optimizations[0]. At a technical level, Rust could be amended to address these problems, but at a social level, there are now too many people who can block the change, and there's a growing body of backwards compatibility to preserve. This leads reasonable people to give up on Rust and use something else[0], which compounds situations like [2] where projects that need it drop it because it's hard to find people to work on it. Having written low-level high-performance programs, Fabrice Bellard has the experience to write a memory safe language that allows hardware control. And he has the faculties to assess design changes without tying them up in committee. I covet his attentions in this space. [0]: https://databento.com/blog/why-we-didnt-rewrite-our-feed-handler-in-rust https://databento.com/blog/why-we-didnt-rewrite-our-feed-han... [1]: https://blog.polybdenum.com/2024/06/07/the-inconceivable-types-of-rust-how-to-make-self-borrows-safe.html https://blog.polybdenum.com/2024/06/07/the-inconceivable-typ... [2]: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/12/21/dropping-hyper/ https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/12/21/dropping-hyper/
  - Lerc 10mo ago
    I think of Rust might trigger a new generation of languages that are developed with the hindsight of rust. The principle of zero cost abstractions avoids a slow slide of compromising abstraction cost, but I think there could be small cost abstractions that would make for a more pragmatic language. Having Rust to point at to show what performance you could be achieving would aid in avoiding bloating abstractions.
c0brac0bra 10mo ago
The first two links are broken.
- ddtaylor 10mo ago
  The ffmpeg link was changed apparently, but the QEmu link still works he just redirects to the QEmu homepage.
simonw 10mo ago
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/ https://bellard.org/ts_server/ and https://textsynth.com/ https://textsynth.com/
- ronsor 10mo ago
  I used to play around with Textsynth, but not being OSS killed the appeal for me once llama.cpp came around.
  - brabel 10mo ago
    I thought Bellard might be behind even llama.cpp (that would be completely expected for Bellard) but it's actually another great who's done that: Georgi Gerganov: https://github.com/ggerganov https://github.com/ggerganov
groundzeros2015 10mo ago
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.
- drschwabe 10mo ago
  When I first read the source for his original QuickJS implementation I was amazed to discover he created the entirety of JavaScript in a single xxx thousand line C file (more or less). That was a sort of defining moment in my personal coding; a lot of my websites and apps are now single file source wherever possible/practical.
  - zdragnar 10mo ago
    I honestly think the single file thing is best reserved for C, given how bad the language support for modularity is. I've had the inverse experience dealing with a many thousand line "core.php" file way back in the day helping debug an expressionengine site (back in the php 5.2ish days) and it was awful. Unless you have an editor which can create short links in a hierarchical tree from semantic comments to let you organize your thoughts, digging through thousands of lines of code all in the same scope can be exceptionally painful.
    - antirez 10mo ago
      C has no problems splitting programs in N files, to be honest. The reason FB (and myself, for what it is worth) often write single file large programs (Redis was split after N years of being a single file) is because with enough programming experience you know one very simple thing: complexity is not about how many files you have, but about the internal structure and conceptually separated modules boundaries. At some point you mainly split for compilation time and to better orient yourself into the file, instead of having to seek a very large mega-file. Pointing the finger to some program that is well written because it's a single file, strlongly correlates to being not a very expert programmer.
      - 10mo ago
MontyCarloHall 10mo ago
Whenever someone says there's no such thing as a 10x programmer, I point them to Fabrice and they usually change their mind.
- rossant 10mo ago
  Perhaps closer to 100x actually.
  - attractivechaos 10mo ago
    You can call 1000 averaged programmers and see if they can write MicroQuickJS using the same amount of time, or call one averaged programmer and see if he/she can write MicroQuickJS to the same quality in his/her life time. 10X, 100X or 1000X measures the productivity of us mortals, not someone like Fabrice Bellard.
    - thechao 10mo ago
      If you're in a room with 100 physicists and Feynman, the accumulated wisdom of Feynman is your best bet.
- zipy124 10mo ago
  People only deny the existence of such people based on their own ego, believing that no one could possibly be worth 10x more or produce 10x more than they can. Those who have seen those people know full well these people exist. It's kind of crazy it ever became some accepted world view, given how every field has a 10xer that is rather famous for it, whether it be someone who dominates in sport, an academic like Paul Erdős or Euler, a programmer like Fabrice or Linus Torvalds, a leader like Napoleon , or any number of famous inventors throughout history.
didip 10mo ago
For real. The GOAT is at it again!
encom 10mo ago
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.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
mightybyte 10mo ago
He's also won the International Obfuscated C Code Contest 3 times. https://www.ioccc.org/authors.html#Fabrice_Bellard https://www.ioccc.org/authors.html#Fabrice_Bellard
rasz 10mo ago
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 https://www.amarisoft.com/company/about-us
- userbinator 10mo ago
  I was going to mention the last one, and his ASN.1 compiler which is likely related to his telco work: https://bellard.org/ffasn1/ https://bellard.org/ffasn1/
  - cryptonector 10mo ago
    As a maintainer of an ASN.1 compiler, I think his ASN.1 compiler must be quite awesome (it's not open source), and it's brilliant of him to make it proprietary. I bet he makes good money from it.
PaulDavisThe1st 10mo ago
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".
- fullstackchris 10mo ago
  Reading some of these comments, it's clear very few in here have ever written a productive customer facing full stack app "javascript is really good for a single file app!!!" ok, maybe if you're rendering static HTML... -> these are not serious people
  - tracker1 10mo ago
    FWIW, most of my shell scripting these days is Deno+TS...
kallistisoft 10mo ago
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!
xgkickt 10mo ago
Wikipedia doesn't list any honours awarded by the French Government. Nor do I see anything from ACM. Definitely overdue some official recognition.
mobilio 10mo ago
and LZEXE

bborud 10mo ago

And that’s just his open source work.

justmarc 10mo ago

Don't forget his LZEXE from the good old DOS days which was an excellent piece of work at the time.

sedatk 10mo ago
Self-decompressing executables felt like magic to me at the time. Fantastic work, overall.
- phatskat 10mo ago
  Reading about APE similarly sparkled me - the amount of ingenuity and sheer amazingness (if not perhaps a touch of depravity) that goes into these kinds of endeavors is awe inspiring.
lioeters 10mo ago
I remember LZEXE from those olden days. When I discovered the author of FFmpeg and QEMU also created LZEXE, I was so impressed. I've been using his software for my entire computing career. It's similar to the respect I have for the work of Anders Hejlsberg, who created Turbo Pascal, with which I learned to program; and also C# and TypeScript.

vatsachak 10mo ago

Don't forget his LLM based text compression software that won awards. Guy is a genius. I hope he tries Rust someday

hsaliak 10mo ago
peak hacker news comment lol
- vatsachak 10mo ago
  I've only been here for a month. I guess I'm learning well
elevation 10mo ago
Fabrice, if you're reading this, please consider replacing Rust instead with your own memory safe language. The design intent of Rust is a powerful idea, and Rust is the best of its class, but the language itself is under-specified[1] which prevents basic, provably-correct optimizations[0]. At a technical level, Rust could be amended to address these problems, but at a social level, there are now too many people who can block the change, and there's a growing body of backwards compatibility to preserve. This leads reasonable people to give up on Rust and use something else[0], which compounds situations like [2] where projects that need it drop it because it's hard to find people to work on it. Having written low-level high-performance programs, Fabrice Bellard has the experience to write a memory safe language that allows hardware control. And he has the faculties to assess design changes without tying them up in committee. I covet his attentions in this space. [0]: https://databento.com/blog/why-we-didnt-rewrite-our-feed-handler-in-rust https://databento.com/blog/why-we-didnt-rewrite-our-feed-han... [1]: https://blog.polybdenum.com/2024/06/07/the-inconceivable-types-of-rust-how-to-make-self-borrows-safe.html https://blog.polybdenum.com/2024/06/07/the-inconceivable-typ... [2]: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/12/21/dropping-hyper/ https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/12/21/dropping-hyper/
- Lerc 10mo ago
  I think of Rust might trigger a new generation of languages that are developed with the hindsight of rust. The principle of zero cost abstractions avoids a slow slide of compromising abstraction cost, but I think there could be small cost abstractions that would make for a more pragmatic language. Having Rust to point at to show what performance you could be achieving would aid in avoiding bloating abstractions.

c0brac0bra 10mo ago

The first two links are broken.

ddtaylor 10mo ago
The ffmpeg link was changed apparently, but the QEmu link still works he just redirects to the QEmu homepage.

simonw 10mo ago

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/ https://bellard.org/ts_server/ and https://textsynth.com/ https://textsynth.com/

ronsor 10mo ago
I used to play around with Textsynth, but not being OSS killed the appeal for me once llama.cpp came around.
- brabel 10mo ago
  I thought Bellard might be behind even llama.cpp (that would be completely expected for Bellard) but it's actually another great who's done that: Georgi Gerganov: https://github.com/ggerganov https://github.com/ggerganov

groundzeros2015 10mo ago

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.

drschwabe 10mo ago
When I first read the source for his original QuickJS implementation I was amazed to discover he created the entirety of JavaScript in a single xxx thousand line C file (more or less). That was a sort of defining moment in my personal coding; a lot of my websites and apps are now single file source wherever possible/practical.
- zdragnar 10mo ago
  I honestly think the single file thing is best reserved for C, given how bad the language support for modularity is. I've had the inverse experience dealing with a many thousand line "core.php" file way back in the day helping debug an expressionengine site (back in the php 5.2ish days) and it was awful. Unless you have an editor which can create short links in a hierarchical tree from semantic comments to let you organize your thoughts, digging through thousands of lines of code all in the same scope can be exceptionally painful.
  - antirez 10mo ago
    C has no problems splitting programs in N files, to be honest. The reason FB (and myself, for what it is worth) often write single file large programs (Redis was split after N years of being a single file) is because with enough programming experience you know one very simple thing: complexity is not about how many files you have, but about the internal structure and conceptually separated modules boundaries. At some point you mainly split for compilation time and to better orient yourself into the file, instead of having to seek a very large mega-file. Pointing the finger to some program that is well written because it's a single file, strlongly correlates to being not a very expert programmer.
    - 10mo ago

MontyCarloHall 10mo ago

Whenever someone says there's no such thing as a 10x programmer, I point them to Fabrice and they usually change their mind.

rossant 10mo ago
Perhaps closer to 100x actually.
- attractivechaos 10mo ago
  You can call 1000 averaged programmers and see if they can write MicroQuickJS using the same amount of time, or call one averaged programmer and see if he/she can write MicroQuickJS to the same quality in his/her life time. 10X, 100X or 1000X measures the productivity of us mortals, not someone like Fabrice Bellard.
  - thechao 10mo ago
    If you're in a room with 100 physicists and Feynman, the accumulated wisdom of Feynman is your best bet.
zipy124 10mo ago
People only deny the existence of such people based on their own ego, believing that no one could possibly be worth 10x more or produce 10x more than they can. Those who have seen those people know full well these people exist. It's kind of crazy it ever became some accepted world view, given how every field has a 10xer that is rather famous for it, whether it be someone who dominates in sport, an academic like Paul Erdős or Euler, a programmer like Fabrice or Linus Torvalds, a leader like Napoleon , or any number of famous inventors throughout history.

didip 10mo ago

For real. The GOAT is at it again!

encom 10mo ago

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.

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]

mightybyte 10mo ago

He's also won the International Obfuscated C Code Contest 3 times. https://www.ioccc.org/authors.html#Fabrice_Bellard https://www.ioccc.org/authors.html#Fabrice_Bellard

rasz 10mo ago

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 https://www.amarisoft.com/company/about-us

userbinator 10mo ago
I was going to mention the last one, and his ASN.1 compiler which is likely related to his telco work: https://bellard.org/ffasn1/ https://bellard.org/ffasn1/
- cryptonector 10mo ago
  As a maintainer of an ASN.1 compiler, I think his ASN.1 compiler must be quite awesome (it's not open source), and it's brilliant of him to make it proprietary. I bet he makes good money from it.

PaulDavisThe1st 10mo ago

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".

fullstackchris 10mo ago
Reading some of these comments, it's clear very few in here have ever written a productive customer facing full stack app "javascript is really good for a single file app!!!" ok, maybe if you're rendering static HTML... -> these are not serious people
- tracker1 10mo ago
  FWIW, most of my shell scripting these days is Deno+TS...

kallistisoft 10mo ago

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!

xgkickt 10mo ago

Wikipedia doesn't list any honours awarded by the French Government. Nor do I see anything from ACM. Definitely overdue some official recognition.

mobilio 10mo ago

and LZEXE