Reading 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.

It'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.

Bellard 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.

Bellard 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/

I 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.

For those unaware, you can find Fabrice's website here: https://bellard.org/

It has a full list of his projects.

First 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.

"Fabrice Bellard" by Andy Gocke and Nick Pizzolato

https://www.ipaidia.gr/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/117-2020-f...

> 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.

Very 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.

My 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.

Fabrice 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!

It'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.

In 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.

I'm a psychofan of Fabrice Bellard. He's unbeatable. He made DVB-T using VGA connector. It's like crazy!

Bellard is a genius. Carmack's modesty about his own genius is impressive too.

I emailed Fabrice in early 2013 when I was starting wit.ai. He replied quickly with a very nice, humble, valuable response.

Little known Fabrice Bellard project. He worked with the ATSC to test the ATSC 3.0 PHY layer when he was consulting at DekTec.

Many 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.

The picture appears to be real, if we trust this source:

https://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/january/6/

You 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.

An 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).

I 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.

QEMU and FFMPEG!!

Where would we be today without Fabrice?

"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?

Can 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?

Bellard seems to be at the extreme tail of the distribution of talent x grit/perseverance.

“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.”

Mildly funny that Carmack is quote tweeting a slop biography of Bellard from a pure AI slop account

bellard.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.

> 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

When I saw the title I first thought of Fabien Sanglard.

Best 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.

RIP 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.

How 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?

Maybe a hot take, but I wouldn't call Carmack a great programmer as in _one of the greats_, but definitely influental and original.

Carmack replies to slop generated by slop account. What a time to be alive.

Does Fabrice Ballard have any interviews?

Why bother with the long comments? Just go to http://bellard.org

remember when HN was interesting?

From 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?

"... 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.

> 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...

The tweet Carmack's replying to is such a gross, cloying example of LLM slop. Bellard, of course is a legend.

I’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

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”.

Fabrice 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.

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Fabrice Bellard is the actual greatest programmer that has ever lived.

Carmack's "almost certainly" doesn't look good here.

#howtomakethisaboutme "Almost certainly better than I am", eff off Carmack.

"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.

I am sorry John...who hinted that you were better programmer than Fabrice? And how is the AGI going? Any release date?