14 ms·
I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
https://xcancel.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/2064095424420487226 https://xcancel.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/2064095424420487226
- asxndu 4mo agoDoes Fabrice Ballard have any interviews?
- sph 4mo agoFirst time I see his picture, and it’s a bit like someone’s revealed the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto when it’s clear they are going out of their way to protect their privacy and stay out of the limelight. My impression is the guy had always better things to do than engage with the greater internet, like thinking real hard and solving difficult problems. Much respect to his work, but even more respect to his work ethic. When you have a strong vision, you need the ivory tower style of development rather than spending your days arguing and defending your choices with internet strangers.
- bitwize 4mo agoAs I say, Bellard is Mozart when most of us can't even hope to be Salieri.
- audunw 4mo agoMozart doesn’t feel right. The code isn’t beautiful and elegant. It’s not built to last (at least for ffmpeg) or be some kind of masterpiece. He writes code to get a job done or tickle some intellectual curiosity. It’s not beautiful but that’s OK. I think Unicorn illustrates one of the issues with his style. It wouldn’t have needed to exist of the QEMU code was architected into neat components. But then writing spaghetti code that gets the job done is why he’s so fast and effective. It’s a trade off https://www.unicorn-engine.org/docs/beyond_qemu.html https://www.unicorn-engine.org/docs/beyond_qemu.html I think there’s actually a sharp contrast with John Carmack here. Fabrice might be smarter and faster but Carmack is perhaps a better software engineer. You can really see the development of his style from Doom and Quake source code, where Quake 3 source is like a beautiful gem of a code base.
- vkazanov 4mo agoTrue. Carmack was polishing idtech for a decade, and his work is always pleasant to tinker with. Now, what is outstanding in Fabrice's work is that his curiousity projects often end up being breakthroughs. I mean, i have like hundreds of these. Can emacs do that? I make a compiler to do that? How fast can i make this bytrcode to run? And it is cute at best.
- SwellJoe 4mo ago"It’s not beautiful but that’s OK." Really? I find his code elegant and concise.
- hnlmorg 4mo agoI think developers sometimes get too obsessed with code quality thinking that smarter code makes them a better developer. In fact I’ve seen developers fall into the trap of mistaking their code as the product and thus spend so much time beautifying it that that fail to ever release anything. Then you have the other end of the spectrum where people are too focused on hacking stuff together that the end result is unmaintainable. The reality is there needs to be a bit of both to be a good developer. For example, if you’re building a proof of concept (POC), then it’s more important to prove the idea than it is to define the architecture. And the reason for that is because you don’t always understand how the final product (whether it’s commercial software or a FOSS library) is best architected until you’ve gone through a few drafts of the idea. So spaghetti code isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But then when you know your idea works and you need to flesh it out into something more durable, you start to refactor the spaghetti into something more maintainable. Fabrice mainly releases POCs while Carmack mainly releases finished products. So it’s unsurprising you’ll see a difference in the style of architecting in their code. I used to be someone who focused on beautiful code for my POCs too. And used to fail to release any personal projects. Then one day I learned to embrace the chaos of POCs and realised that you can getting something built and tarting it up afterwards was better than failing to build anything at all.
- shevy-java 4mo agoI imagined him with wild, long hair; possibly tattoos, huge and heavy set. The picture destroyed my imagination - and now I want my imagination back. :(
- sph 4mo agoExcept the ‘huge and heavy set’, you’re thinking of tokyospliff here.
- huhtenberg 4mo agoOr some version of RMS :)
- taway20260616 4mo agoIf you want your "imagination" back, go back to watching Netflix and Hollywood cliches.
- throwaway2037 4mo agoIn my personal experience, uber French nerds don't really fit the Simpsons "Comic Book Guy" appearance stereotype. Anyone else reading this, feel free to disagree.
- speedgoose 4mo agoYes, it’s difficult to practice climbing if you are obese.
- gaigalas 4mo agoHonestly, two mythologized figures (Carmack and Bellard). They're good (like, quite good), but as soon as their names come up people start talking about some weird expectation of what they are supposed to think rather than the actual things they did. Somehow, that mythologizing diminishes their accomplishments.
- noufalibrahim 4mo agoNot exactly my idea. However, it's pleasant to see two people I admire so much having respect for each other.
- MomsAVoxell 4mo agoOh, this is human nature and you will find it impossible to avoid this framing of cult figures, because they are indeed cult figures - albeit positively perceived ones, since they appear to not just be doing it for themselves, but altruistically every wonder they produce is for their users - and thus their works have effectively and productively impacted the lives of millions of other people, at economies of scale most of us here on HN aspire to. And it is that aspiration you’re degrading with the rush to de-mythologize, as if it weren’t inevitable, under the crushing rush of time, that we in the hacker world had heroes.
- gaigalas 4mo agoHumanity has some 300.000 years of existing, and we can only trace back the prevalence of cult figures a few thousand years back. For all we know, it could be a temporary fluke and we'll snap back to something else. We could be beings with no default to snap back to, ever changing, destined to dissolve the prevalence of cult figures into something else in the following eras. In a few thousand years we could totally see this practice as some distant-past thing like making clay pots or carrying Roman dodecahedrons. The new cultural trend could become jumping off cliffs, and someone would be arguing that it's inevitable human nature. By the way, no rush to de-mythologize. I'm not fighting any dragon here, you do you.
- 4mo ago
- keyle 4mo agoNo he never hid his identity, if you looked him up, you found his picture. Satoshi shouldn't be compared, I don't hold bitcoins nor am I interested, but the name is a lore. It was stamped on the original document. Fabrice Bellard is a real person shipping code; not an internet anonymous identity.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- coldtea 4mo agoParent knows. He makes an analogy, not an absolute equivalence.
- bravetraveler 4mo ago[flagged]
- alfiedotwtf 4mo agoThis thread is why he is not on Twitter
- bravetraveler 4mo agoFascinating, I'm not there for other reasons. So, about that costly Tea...
- herodoturtle 4mo agoAnd I'm here wondering if there's a limit to HN's nested replies.
- bravetraveler 4mo agoI'll continue to do my part as time allows, also curious. Anyway, if enough flag the top [like I did], it'll collapse.
- Zardoz84 4mo agoSad that him can't show the same respect for "Burguer" Rebecca Ann Heineman.
- Quarrel 4mo agoerr? afaik Bellard never had any beef with Burger Becky. Both are legendary programmers, but somewhat different eras. I have no idea what you're suggesting.
- TheAmazingRace 4mo agoI think he was referring to Carmack's note on Burger Becky when she passed away.
- Quarrel 4mo agoAh, thanks, yeah, I just looked it up. I had no idea.
- copperx 4mo ago"He is almost certainly a better overall programmer than I am." Hedging the claim with a lot of qualifiers. What's wrong with admitting someone is a better programmer? even giving someone else the benefit of the doubt?
- KeplerBoy 4mo agoTrue, it's a weird thing to say. I am in no position to rank them, I assume they are both excellent at their niches (granted bellard seems to be interested in a lot of niches) but it never hurt anybody to be humble in this position.
- saidnooneever 4mo agoits because carmacl enjoys a lot of fame around his tricks. ppl get like that.
- vkazanov 4mo agoWell, carmack is THE game dev of 90s and 2000s fame. His 2d/3d engine work was outstanding back in the day. Bellard did multiple breakthroughs: ffmpeg, qemu, tcc, jslinux, a state of the art FFT algorithm. I probable skipped a few. With all due respect to carmack, a single ballard's projects would put anybody into the eternal hall of programmers fame right next to Linus, Carmack, Stallman, the Bell labs crowd and others. i do understand how carmack did what he did logistically (time, effort, skills, compensation)... Fabrice is just out of this world. When? How? Why? No idea.
- fmajid 4mo agoHe is also a mathematician, having invented a new algorithm for calculating the digits of pi
- nickcw 4mo agoHere is his paper on it which is a little 2 pager: https://bellard.org/pi/pi_bin.pdf https://bellard.org/pi/pi_bin.pdf Though I have to say the last line of the proof "...which gives (1) by reordering the terms" took me much head scratching to understand!
- huflungdung 4mo ago[dead]
- evilturnip 4mo agoIt's obvious that those that write the tools/infrastructure are less visible than those that create the end product. I don't know a single name behind the construction of the AI tensor core in Nvidia's chips but it is effectively what runs all of AI.
- shevy-java 4mo agoI think Fabrice is actually quite noticeable. His name kept on coming up again and again in the past. He is definitely not incognito as such, even if he may not be that interest in hyping up his own name either.
- anyfoo 4mo agoHe's basically a rock star here. (And well deservedly so.)
- brcmthrowaway 4mo agoThey can't hear you, they're on a yacht
- afavour 4mo agoI think that undersells Bellard. The engineers that made NVidia’s chips made a trade: they give their achievements and potential public recognition to their employer in return for generous compensation. Bellard’s work is overwhelmingly free and open source.
- tjpnz 4mo agoFrom the tweet he's replying to: >A quiet French engineer who never moved to Silicon Valley wrote the code that quietly runs the internet. Why do some assume you need to move to SV to make an impact in tech?
- Tade0 4mo agoPresumably because "money". Or they just don't know tech outside of SV, which is understandable, considering the rest doesn't do nearly the same amount of self-promotion and, well, they're not from SV anyway so why should SV care? The other day there was this article: something something nerds, which assumed (almost) everyone in tech was looking up to Jobs and Wozniak. I think I saw my first Mac in 2006 or so and only for a brief moment - it belonged to an artist the parents of my high school friend employed. The next time it was a musician. That was really the stereotype in my corner of the world at the time and using Apple devices for programming seemed like a weird idea.
- dofm 4mo agoI had assumed it was slop but whether or not it is, that is kind of a revealing default isn't it?
- thibaut_barrere 4mo agoThere’s a strong narrative that it’s unreasonable to stay in the EU (“too regulated”, etc.) if you want to hack on real stuff. Yet plenty of us do — Bellard being exhibit A.
- gitanovic 4mo agoSalvatore Sanfilippo (a.k.a. Antirez) exhibit B
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- u1hcw9nx 4mo agoYou can stay in EU if you don't need large amounts of capital needed to grow. EU is thin in capital, not in innovation. Regulation is not an issue for high-tech. The list of smaller startups US and Chinese megacorps buy every year from EU is staggering.
- shevy-java 4mo agoFabrice is kind of like a space explorer. He goes where few people went before. I think I first noticed this either with regard to JSLinux, or possibly some software he wrote before that; don't fully remember which year. It's like some people go deliberately to more unique problems with regards to software that actually works in achieving that outcome, whatever the outcome may be.
- swiftcoder 4mo ago> A French engineer who lives quietly in Paris has spent 30 years writing software that the entire internet now runs on without knowing his name. ... do tech people really not know who Fabrice Bellard is? He's kind of a household name in a lot of programming circles
- pdpi 4mo ago"Tech people" aren't one single homogeneous mass. His name is unlikely to show up in the same conversation as, say, DHH.
- jdsnape 4mo agoI knew of Fabrice, and have admired him for many years…but who is DHH?
- otabdeveloper4 4mo agoYeah, same.
- konart 4mo agoRuby on Rails creator (among other things).
- Bigpet 4mo agoIf you did "web stuff" in the early 2000s (like 2005-2010). You'd probably know who he is. He did Ruby on Rails, a backend web framework. But that was also very Start-up and America focussed. So if you did web dev in some other country and didn't have colleagues who were into that culture you still might've missed the name.
- konart 4mo agoTBH the biggest difference is him being more vocal. I'm pretty sure most of the people who did "web stuff" at the time and used twitter (key point maybe) know him simply because you'd often see his tweets. Regardless of coutry (I'm from Russia, for exampl)
- hamburgererror 4mo ago> He just keeps shipping. > He just wrote code. > He was not done. > He kept going. > He is still shipping. That guy talks like a scrum master, this linkedin bullshit writing style is just so bad...
- infofarmer 4mo agoObviously an LLM and sad Carmack engages with slop to normalize it.
- latexr 4mo agoMy “favourite” was “a project called JSLinux that engineers still cannot believe is real”. Such dumb hyperbole.
- grokys 4mo agoPretty sure this is just AI writing style, and yes it's a huge turnoff.
- st_goliath 4mo ago> He kept going. > He is still shipping. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/schiffen#Etymology_2 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/schiffen#Etymology_2 :-P
- circus1540 4mo agoHe is also wrong. Saying "KVM runs on top of QEMU" is a very funny way of looking at it. And the claim that QEMU backs Google Cloud or AWS or Azure(???) is just plain incorrect. Not downplaying Fabrice's contributions - this tweet is just dumb.
- sph 4mo agoIt's an AI generated profile that posts this kind of slop weekly about popular developers and entrepreneurs. The type of feel good shit that makes the front page of social media. Not even Carmack is immune.
- rcastellotti 4mo agoremember when HN was interesting?
- ErroneousBosh 4mo agoIt used to have a lot less stuff about AI in it. It'd be great if we could just filter off all the posts about LLMs and LLM-related crap.
- stock_toaster 4mo agoPepperidge Farms remembers...
- pandaforce 4mo agoBellard hasn't been involved in FFmpeg for *over 20 years* at this point, and more like 23. His code was not great and reeked of sphagetti due to FFmpeg back then lacking any framework for code sharing between components and codecs. These days none of his code survives. Everything that became of FFmpeg is because of other developers. Yet he's treated as the one-and-only BDFL of FFmpeg, with any other developers building upon his wise framework since time immemorial. These days all he does is hold the copyright, which lets him, *and only him*, elect which project/leader may call itself FFmpeg. He's an unelected dictator, who already used his powers once to ostracize libav developers in favor of another dictator.
- doppp 4mo agoYou alright, mate?
- thedevilslawyer 4mo agoThat's just, like, your opinion man
- jdw64 4mo agoYou could be right. I don't really know much about FFMpeg. But going from 0 to 1 and going from 1 to 100 are different. Usually, people remember the 0 to 1 step more. Symbolic capital tends to go to the first mover. It might feel unfair, but we always remember the first challenger. It might be spaghetti code, there might be countless contributions later, but that's usually how it goes
- lnsru 4mo agoWhat you describe is obvious corporate management path. You start with MVP, it gets traction, bosses like you and then others will code for the original author dismantling and rewriting original MVP. And don’t be shy - if one can pull this off he’s worth the credits. There are many who can code and not much who can manage.
- keyle 4mo agoThanks, that maybe one side of the coin but it's very one-sided. The man is busy innovating and maybe has no time to carry on as he focuses on other projects. But he was there from the start and made it happen. Most of the code in the linux kernel today is not from Linus.
- ErroneousBosh 4mo ago"... that the entire Internet runs on without knowing his name" I'd hazard a guess that most people who run Internet things know who Fabrice Bellard is, and may indeed have spoken to him at some point.
- jdw64 4mo agoHow on earth were those people able to create such amazing things? Will I ever be able to create something that brilliant someday? What should I even make? I have so many more tools than they did, even LLMs. Where can I learn the ideas and skills they had?
- EugeneOZ 4mo agoStart fixing the unfixable and doing the undoable things ;)
- alecco 4mo agoThe smart path: Find good mentors (and return the favor); use LLMs not to do the work but to help you learn and exercise your brain: make them test you, using something aking to teacher/Socratic method, make mistakes and get the mentor/LLM to review in a way you figure out the answer.
- ivanjermakov 4mo agoFind a problem and work on a solution for 20+ years.
- smallstepforman 4mo agoFind an itch, then scratch it. If many people have the same itch and can use your solution, you win. Simple as that.
- vidarh 4mo agoThe converse: Most itches will either be idiosyncratic, and not get you much attention, or lots of people will be scratching them and it's hard to come out "on top". I scratch lots of itches, but I also know that most of them are very, very fringe. So going into scratching itches expecting fame is not going to go well for most. But scratching itches is satisfying, so for my part at least I don't care.
- ldargin 4mo agoDon't use LLMs except for the most menial things. Get as much practice in creating various things. Study expert-level books on related subjects. Foster your creativity in other areas too (i.e. writing, drawing, music). Don't pass up the chance to work with veteran developers; be ready for that opportunity when it comes.
- leonidasrup 4mo ago"Fabrice Bellard" by Andy Gocke and Nick Pizzolato https://www.ipaidia.gr/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/117-2020-fabrice-bellard.pdf https://www.ipaidia.gr/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/117-2020-f...
- throwaway2037 4mo agoJesus... has that ever been submitted to HN!? It should be.
- leonidasrup 4mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46377862 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46377862
- ShinyLeftPad 4mo agoIt's pretty dated since he's done more stuff since!
- companycalls 4mo agoDo you know if that's the same Nick Pizzolato who wrote True Detective?
- jonahx 4mo agoIt's not. Different spelling: Nic Pizzolatto.
- jf 4mo agoCan anybody point me at any interviews of Fabrice? I've looked several times (including just now) and I can't find /anything/ - am I missing something obvious?
- Zealotux 4mo agoHe gives virtually no interviews and will not talk about himself, here's an example from 2014 where only replies to technical questions: https://www.macplus.net/depeche-82364-interview-le-createur-du-bpg-discute-de-son-format https://www.macplus.net/depeche-82364-interview-le-createur-...
- kergonath 4mo ago> He gives virtually no interviews and will not talk about himself Case in point, from the linked interview: > Could you say a couple of words about yourself? > I would rather not talk about myself, except that I created other projects such as FFmpeg or QEMU.
- rramadass 4mo agoBiography - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46377862 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46377862 My previous comment with links - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46372370 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46372370 dang's links - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46379975 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46379975
- throwaway2037 4mo agoFor those unaware, you can find Fabrice's website here: https://bellard.org/ https://bellard.org/ It has a full list of his projects.
- slmjkdbtl 4mo agoGreat programmers often also have great personal website design, everything is so clear and not one bit of redundance.
- throwaway2037 4mo agoThe website of Daniel J. Bernstein is similar: https://cr.yp.to/djb.html https://cr.yp.to/djb.html Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_J._Bernstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_J._Bernstein
- fatata123 4mo ago[dead]
- gverrilla 4mo ago> not one bit of redundance What about the url on the first displayed line? Not saying it's bad - got me thinking about this self-reference that most modern websites do with the logo on the header.
- rafram 4mo agoIt's really not a great design. It's just nerdy in a HN way. A great website would list projects in approximate order of importance/notability, would use the tiniest bit of CSS to make the text readable on wide screens, and would have images for projects with a visual component. The only reason his site is appealing is because you already know who he is.
- justin66 4mo ago> A great website would list projects in approximate order of importance/notability Why?
- latexr 4mo agoI’m asking genuinely: What’s the point of linking to Carmack’s tweet? The intellectual curiosity (what HN is ostensibly about) is all in the quoted tweet (despite it being written like an LLM trained on LinkedIn posts). Carmack isn’t really adding anything of importance or interest. Linking to him feels a bit cult of personality, as if Bellard is deserving of attention because Carmack gave some vague praise with qualifiers. Why not link directly to the quoted tweet, or even the Wikipedia page? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard Surely we are all capable of understanding Bellard’s contributions and judge them on their own merits without needing some famous programmer to point directly at it and saying “this good”.
- menaerus 4mo agoThe tweet also reads a bit off to me too. Carmack positions himself as if he is a some sort of a litmus test for being a great and successful programmer, which I don't doubt that he is but it's a bit strange. Egotripping.
- Capricorn2481 4mo agoIf most people would agree with that, is it really egotripping?
- menaerus 4mo agoIt is because oneself does not speak about himself or herself in superlatives. Others should do it.
- latexr 4mo agoThis has gotten a ton of upvotes, then a ton of downvotes. Yet no one has yet answered the question. If you are downvoting, presumably you believe there is a point to linking to Carmack’s tweet. That it somehow adds more value than the alternative. So please explain why. Like I said before, I am asking genuinely.
- wiseowise 4mo agoCarmack replies to slop generated by slop account. What a time to be alive.
- self_awareness 4mo agoFabrice Bellard is the actual greatest programmer that has ever lived. Carmack's "almost certainly" doesn't look good here.
- dude250711 4mo agoThe actual greatest programmer is the one who gets compensated according to their output.
- self_awareness 4mo agoNo, that's a regular programmer.
- kergonath 4mo agoWhat does it have to do with compensation? Creativity for creativity’s sake is also important. Not everyone spends their life chasing dollars.
- bananaflag 4mo agoWhen I saw the title I first thought of Fabien Sanglard.
- p0w3n3d 4mo agoI'm a psychofan of Fabrice Bellard. He's unbeatable. He made DVB-T using VGA connector. It's like crazy!
- kzrdude 4mo agoThe picture appears to be real, if we trust this source: https://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/january/6/ https://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/january/6/
- backscratches 4mo agoWhy wouldn't it be real?
- stymaar 4mo agoBetter safe than sorry in today's internet.
- kzrdude 4mo agoIf the rest of the tweet is ai-generated, why not the picture? In fact, if you ask me, I think the tweet's picture is semi-real; I trust the computer history museum to have the original and the tweet has an AI-upscaled photo with artificial details.
- rozab 4mo agoI think you are right, the checked pattern on the shirt is not directionally consistent
- rasz 4mo agoYou might have missed this gem https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48390688 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48390688 this to be exact https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48400935 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48400935
- brokensegue 4mo agoanyone have a free photo for wikipedia?
- fguerraz 4mo agoIn 2006, in my first job after uni in France, I wrote a toy PaaS system called CASIMIR based on qemu. It was a lot of fun, I could via a web UI launch VMs, access them via VNC, etc.. I've always had a lot of admiration for Fabrice Bellard, I always wished I was as good an engineer as he is.
- BLKNSLVR 4mo agoQEMU and FFMPEG!! Where would we be today without Fabrice?
- lolive 4mo agoOur sexual life would be failing dates and still images.
- throwa356262 4mo ago"He is almost certainly a better overall programmer than I am." There is no almost John. One of you has kept shipping for 30 years, the other one has spent most of the last couple of years in courts for stealing from former employers or on social media promoting being toxic and "anti woke" (whatever that is). For me Michael Abrash (Quake, xbox) is a much better developer and person.
- j3th9n 4mo ago#howtomakethisaboutme "Almost certainly better than I am", eff off Carmack.
- cassianoleal 4mo ago> Today FFmpeg is the invisible engine of the internet. I get what the author is saying but I really dislike this hyperbole. The Internet will be absolutely fine if FFmpeg suddenly disappears. Companies that rely on it in the core of their product may not, but the Internet absolutely will, and the vast majority of websites and other Internet services will keep working just fine.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- newsclues 4mo agoWithout YouTube and porn, is there really an internet?
- bcjdjsndon 4mo agoMore like without video, is there still internet..... Absolutely yes. It's a tad hyperbolic I agree
- lolive 4mo agoMy kids strongly disagree.
- bcjdjsndon 4mo agoFortnight isn't a video
- lintfordpickle 4mo agoalthough, somewhat ironic to your argument, I bet the intro that fornite plays when starting the game uses ffmpeg
- bcrosby95 4mo ago
- drmpeg 4mo agoLittle known Fabrice Bellard project. He worked with the ATSC to test the ATSC 3.0 PHY layer when he was consulting at DekTec.
- lproven 4mo agoRather than potentially 1000 HN readers each spending 15 minutes on Google trying to work out what you are talking about, may I suggest that you expand that with a few plain English sentences that tell us what that means? I have no idea what "ATSC" means, and I've been in tech for nearly 40 years now so I have a fairly good handle on this stuff.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- lambdaone 4mo agoBellard is a genius. Carmack's modesty about his own genius is impressive too.
- gmm1990 4mo agoI wouldn’t call comparing yourself to Fabrice Ballard and not just saying he’s a better programmer modest.
- uberex 4mo agoYeah he phrases it odd. Like with the "almost certainly" and "overall" qualifiers. Not "he is a better programmer than I would dream to be..."
- fdsfsdsd 4mo ago"He is almost certainly a better overall programmer than I am." That is a work of art in and of itself. It's genius narcissism. "almost certainly", "overall programmer", are we really going there? Are we 16? Why even do the comparison? Fabrice is not a "programmer". He is an engineer. Programming is a medium he often works in and that medium is completely meaningless in and of itself. I would be offended if someone called me a "programmer".
- slibhb 4mo agoHad the same reaction to Carmack's wording. I don't agree about the distinction between programming and engineering; to me it's all programming, engineering is just the word we started using to make it sound higher status.
- fdsfsdsd 4mo agoFair enough. I can see your point about engineering, but in this case I find it hard to classify the generic SaaS programmer and the guy calculating Pi to 2700 billion digits on his workstation using his own formula - which actually is the innovation here - under the same rubric, but I guess that boat has sailed a long time ago.
- te_chris 4mo agoThe tweet Carmack's replying to is such a gross, cloying example of LLM slop. Bellard, of course is a legend.
- zerr 4mo agoAn opinion: there were (and are) many great unknown engineers behind proprietary corporate projects. FFmpeg and QEMU became famous because these are open-source projects, not because nothing similar was done before (it was done, but in the proprietary world).
- hashar 4mo agoMaybe but I think you are underestimating the achievements Fabrice has accomplished. Among others: - Improved an algorithm to compute Pi, ran it on a *personal laptop* and broke the world record. That achievement is not even listed on his personal homepage, and it a single line of facts with Zero bragging involved https://www.bellard.org/pi/pi2700e9/ https://www.bellard.org/pi/pi2700e9/ - a PC emulator in vanilla javascript, boot the Linux Kernel in a browser and get a virtual terminal also implemented from scratch - QuickJS, embeddable, self contained (no libs) and fast JavaScript engine matching almost entirely ES2025 - NNCP, a Neural Networks driven lossless data compression system And more https://www.bellard.org/ https://www.bellard.org/ I have been referring to his page for decades as an example of one can have a huge respect without having a fancy web page and no bragging at all. He is a genius :-)
- zerr 4mo agoNot at all. I mean, regardless of him not having a fancy web page or an Instagram, he is anyway an Internet geek celebrity we all know and respect. My point is that I believe there are many similar but noname engineers whose achievements stayed and will stay behind corporate proprietary walls.
- ergl 4mo ago[flagged]
- thunderbong 4mo agoWhy don't you click on the xcancel link and read the whole thing?
- stymaar 4mo agoThe whole slop you mean?
- ar7hur 4mo agoI emailed Fabrice in early 2013 when I was starting wit.ai. He replied quickly with a very nice, humble, valuable response.
- miki123211 4mo agoIt's interesting to me that most of Bellard's work is basically turning specs into C. His most important projects are ffmpeg (codec specs), qEmu (ISA specs), QuickJS (the EcmaScript spec), tinyC (the C spec), and his telecom company (LTE specs). I guess the pi calculations and neural network stuff are exceptions. Just to be clear, this doesn't make his work any less impressive. Highly performant codec and emulator implementations are no easy feat; it's just interesting that most of this work falls into that relatively narrow area.
- apitman 4mo agoMaybe pi is a spec. Just not written by man.
- reactordev 4mo agoThere was a time when we would spend an enormous amount of time defining a spec, so that we can farm out the code. Now, we farm out the spec so that we can spend an enormous amount of time with the code.
- jimbokun 4mo agoNow we replace both with prompts.
- izacus 4mo agoIf you actually work with ffmpeg, it's rather quite impressive how pluggable the architecture is. The codecs have huge amount of quirks and disagreements about basics (what is a "frame" in audio, subtitle, and video worlds?) and even their environment (passing frames around software and hardware coders is way different). That fact that you can (almost) freely mix and match processing between such different worlds is quite an achievement and libav (IMO) is decently well designed to allow that.
- jimbokun 4mo agoThis description feels like how jQuery unified all the disparate JavaScript implementations behind a single framework.
- walthamstow 4mo agoMildly funny that Carmack is quote tweeting a slop biography of Bellard from a pure AI slop account
- spwa4 4mo agoWhy bother with the long comments? Just go to http://bellard.org http://bellard.org
- Keyframe 4mo agoMaybe a hot take, but I wouldn't call Carmack a great programmer as in _one of the greats_, but definitely influental and original.
- deltarholamda 4mo agoI'm not even sure how you'd define a great programmer. Like Justice Potter Stewart I sort of "know it when I see it". For example, I don't think anybody is going to put Rasmus Lerdorf on the Mount Rushmore of Great Programmers, but man alive is PHP really important and quite good, even at the time of release.
- santiagobasulto 4mo agoBellard has a very interesting project that is `ts_zip`, a compression algorithm powered by LLMs. It's just an "experiment" and should never be used in production, but very smart. The description on his website is amusing: "The ts_zip utility can compress (and hopefully decompress) text files using a Large Language Model" https://bellard.org/ts_zip/ https://bellard.org/ts_zip/
- zeroq 4mo agoBut that's exactly what LLMs are. :) My mental model and go to ELI5 is "imagine you compressed the whole internet into a zip-like archive and you have an extremely clever and efficient way to search it for data". I'm old enough to remember the time when you could order wikipedia on CDs and I don't see much difference between that and downloading LLM.
- santiagobasulto 4mo agoThat is true, but I have to be honest and say that I didn’t make the connection until I saw Bellard’s project for the first time, and I said: “ah! That actually makes A LOT of sense”
- zeroq 4mo agoMy biggest gripe about AI is that very few people actually understand that, and many think that LLMs are "thinking" and capable with "coming up with a novel solution". They are not. The only reason one might think the solution is novel is because they never saw it before, but what they are actually receiving is an excerpt from someone elses blog post or stack overflow answer. [1] A bit terrifying thought experiment is to accept for a moment that programming is dead and all its left prompt engineering. Fast forward 5-10-15 years and whos left to actually produce new code and ideas to feed LLMs? [1] one thing I like to do from time to time - especially when I'm asking for something I know little about - is to copy and paste the answer back to google and look where did that answer originated from. One time I asked a very specific linux shell command and the answer didn't sit right with me. I googled it and it pointed me to a stackoverflow question. It was the first answer with ~1000 upvotes. But it also had a comment with ~700 upvotes explaining why you never ever should do that. :)
- andai 4mo agoReading the list of Bellard's contributions, what strikes me is not the raw ability (although certainly there is that too!) but "damn, he knows how to pick 'em!" He keeps picking stuff to work on that ends up being insanely useful to a massive number of people. That seems somehow even more remarkable than the technical ability. Deciding what to work on might be the most important question in life.
- andai 4mo agoMy guess would be the hueristic is "I want to do simple thing, why is it so hard?" (Modern computing has an overabundance of "DX tarpits".) Which is funny because, everyone has that experience, right? But then approximately nobody proceeds to do something about it. (Including most people who have the skills to make a difference!) Like, that's surprisingly mundane, and surprisingly actionable. --- If we distil it into a philosophy, it would be something like... - things should be good - they are not so good - I can learn to make them better And more broadly: "You can just do things"
- athrowaway3z 4mo agoI think you're underestimating the skill required to do it that well. Add 1 wrong feature and suddenly your simple project working around a DX tarpits is a new tarpit. A lot of devs like building features.
- atonse 4mo agoTo be fair, almost zero people praise the dx for ffmpeg. but the utility and value is so massively high, that it overcomes the famously complex dx of ffmpeg. I'm not even insulting ffmpeg, if it does a million things, then there are going to be a million knobs. I think of git as the same. The git cli is not intuitive at all (unless that lightbulb goes off) but the utility is so good, that people just kind of suck it up and use it.
- fc417fc802 4mo ago
- phkahler 4mo agoI think John Carmack is confusing the usefulness of ones contribution to what went in to making it. Both of these men have done amazing things technically and deciding which one is "better" is a fools errand.
- j4k3 4mo agoYou remember when Micro Center had those portraits of computer greats hanging around the ceiling of their stores? I never noticed it until I looked up one day and saw Denis Ritchie, Vint Cerf, Grace Hopper, etc. The local Micro Center was re-done and I can't remember seeing the portraits, but this guy could be a candidate for a Micro Center banner.
- justin66 4mo agoI thought it was rather sad when they removed those. That removal was fairly recent, too. I'm sure plenty of people were saying "who is Dan Bricklin?" but it added some needed character to the store.
- trollbridge 4mo agobellard.org is one of those domains along with righto.com that brings me joy and excitement when I see it pop up on HN. Means it’s gonna be a good day.
- kens 4mo agoThanks!
- nerdsniper 4mo ago“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
- nixon_why69 4mo agoHorrible take given Bellard's lack of general recognition and also the situation in developed-nation-2026. There are 2 billion people not dying in cotton fields or sweatshops, you're not, where's your revolutionary free code that you gave to the world? Over half the planet gets a chance to prove they're smart in this day and age, between gaokao in China and whatever the exams are called in India, plus the western world and the rich portions of poor countries.
- energy123 4mo agoRamanujan is a case in point. Some people just have it built into them, most others don't.
- d4rkp4ttern 4mo agoYou're thinking of the legendary IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) JEE (Joint Entrance Exam). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Entrance_Examination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Entrance_Examination
- nixon_why69 4mo agoThanks!
- nerdsniper 4mo ago> where's your revolutionary free code that you gave to the world? I’m no Einstein. XD I wasn’t trying to minimize Bellard’s contributions! I’m in awe of them, and very grateful. If anything I was just noticing that Fabrice is a fantastic example of how much contribution those geniuses could make if they had access to even the bare minimum of education and stability. For example, if they weren’t growing up in the kilns of India, where they don't actually have real opportunity to participate in “whatever the exams are called in India”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW3cy1kiB-0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW3cy1kiB-0 https://youtu.be/oAOypGQdzGU?is=mLehIyREf0k9TUzk https://youtu.be/oAOypGQdzGU?is=mLehIyREf0k9TUzk
- alecco 4mo agoBellard seems to be at the extreme tail of the distribution of talent x grit/perseverance.
- MisterTea 4mo agoFabrice Bellard is the kind of programmer I admire, respect and aspire to emulate. Extremely humble, yet incredibly talented with a massive corpus of work. Bravo Fabrice!
- redlewel 4mo agoMy jaw dropped when I read this guy wrote ffmpeg AND QEMU!!? Thats insane levels of talent and capability. I remember looking through the source for QEMU and it appeared monstrous in its scale. Dude is a legend, no wonder Carmack is complimenting him.
- Georgelemental 4mo agoTo be clear, while he is the original author of both those programs, both are now developed by other people and have been for many years.
- andrehacker 4mo agoIsn't that how it is supposed to work ? Stroke of genius (over and over again) to get something working given constraints of the day followed by hundreds of engineers who will improve on the foundations, basically like Wozniak ?
- Georgelemental 4mo agoYes, also to be clear, I am not diminishing Bellard's achievement
- bombcar 4mo agoHonestly, the ability to pass off a project to long-term maintainers that don't immediately get overwhelmed, collapse, or explode is perhaps his greatest skill.
- d4rkp4ttern 4mo agoVery very tangential, and at the risk of down-votes, the recent trend of X-articles (or whatever they call them) is extremely irksome. When I try to view on mobile it takes 3-4 hops to get to the article, and the articles always look hyper-optimized for engagement with low-attention-span readers, sort of like LinkedIn posts. Also there's irony in the stark contrast between this x-article and the Bellard's own website.
- bflesch 4mo agoIt's a bit sad that people who are already big VIPs in the tech industry feel the need to spend time writing such tweets, or even worse, hire a PR firm to do it. It's usual for celebrities with the same net worth from other industries, but to me it feels weird.
- delichon 4mo agoI have wondered if I sequentially ask people who is the smartest living person they know, and ask that person next, would it lead me toward the same small group of geniuses. If I were doing that with the best living coder I might well start with Carmack. So next I'd have to go to Bellard, and hope that his answer isn't Carmack.
- JKCalhoun 4mo agoI can list a dozen or so co-workers from my time at Apple that I would choose in an instant.
- dmitrygr 4mo agoApple is heavy in such types, yes
- bflesch 4mo agoIf they are so clever it's weird how they end up with butterfly keyboard, walled garden software, glassy iOS themes, and fight against EU initiatives such as replacable batteries. Apple is a super late stage company, why would a clever person join them just to work under some middle manager.
- JKCalhoun 4mo agoThere are plenty of hard problems that need solving. One co-worker, for example, has headed up the team that convert the proprietary RAW format from various camera vendors to a standard RGB format that can then be edited/adjusted in Photos, etc. The cameras (vendors) never rest and as such he's kept quite busy. Another coworker was the guy you turned to who could walk a stack, read registers, and then tell you that you were trying to dispose of an object on a different thread than you created it on (and the framework that handled the object had stashed important data in the creation thread that it needed for disposal—bad framework). I turned to another coworker when a stack of transforms had my brain in a knot (early bring up of Preview to allow scaling (zoom), translation (scrolling) and rotation while trying to select text (hit-test in the transformed PDF). "The matrix you want to invert should have been created in the reverse order of the transforms that you had applied when displaying the PDF." Oh.) And then there were the GIT experts that could somehow fix the completely fucked up state I had got the project in… And the Smart Guy™ who, glancing at the debugger, might announce that I had exceeded the number of threads allowed per process. (I had no idea there was a limit.) Come to think of it, maybe I'm just an idiot. :-)
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- root-parent 4mo agoI am sorry John...who hinted that you were better programmer than Fabrice? And how is the AGI going? Any release date?
- 123sereusername 4mo ago[dead]
- AndrewKemendo 4mo agoRIP this class of programmer. Ritchie, Knuth, Notch, Carmack, Dean etc… these are like the Mount Rushmore of writing code and I think that era is over.
- rramadass 4mo agoBest way to describe how an "ordinary" Programmer feels towards Fabrice Bellard ;-) "I trust that I am not more dense than my neighbours [i.e. fellow programmers], but I was [and am] always oppressed with a sense of my own stupidity in my dealings with [the works of Fabrice Bellard]." -- inspired by Watson's comment about Sherlock Holmes in "The Red-Headed League" from the volume, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
- fjfaase 4mo agoMany people have complained about the quality of TCC code. It sometimes feel the code id one big unittest including all nasty C edge cases. I found this out when developing an even tinnier C compiler to compile TCC 0.9.26.
- willXare 4mo ago[dead]
- streaming 4mo ago[dead]
- DoneWithAllThat 4mo agoAside, this is why I’m skeptical of the skepticism of the “Great Man” theory of history. Most people scoffing at it have no idea the individual impact that great men and women have on the world. You can both recognize that we all stand on the shoulders of giants and that such giants do exist as individuals (more often than not). Where the giants are collaborative efforts it often takes only minimal digging before you find there’s one person at the core of that group’s effort.
- miroljub 4mo agoWhy not post an original URL instead of the redirector?
- mattjoyce 4mo agoThis post is a link to a reply to a tweet containing a screenshot of a webpage. Unusable internet.
- megous 4mo agoI'll save my admiration for the code or the results. Admiring people for skills is weird. All it takes to build a skill is time and effort and some innate characteristics. Getting listed on popular twitter account is I guess useful, depending on how much you care about receiving attention. But otherwise I'm kinda wary of people who give admiration to a person's skills or people who like to receive it.
- throwaway85825 4mo agoWhy are we letting him waste time on telecom? He needs to be given state patronage so he can make the next qemu/ffmpeg.
- andrewstuart 4mo agoIt makes no sense to compare.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]