HN

Comments (120)

• Menu

  PaulDavisThe1st
  (reposting from the MicroQuickJS thread if only because it seems more relevant here)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".
• Menu

  justapassenger
  He’s one of the GOATs, but this article is written by someone who has no idea about software engineering and full of exaggerations as a result. For example:> Many times there are certain chunks which will occur many times in the code of a program. Instead of taking the time to translate them all separately, QEMU stores the chunks and their native translation, next time simply executing the native translation instead of doing translation a second time. Thus, Bellard invented the first processor emulator that could achieve near native performance in certain instances.JIT is about as old as Fabrice, or even older depending on what you consider a modern JIT.
• poidos
  Publishing ffmpeg and QEMU in a five year span that also included winning IOCCC (twice!) is absolutely bonkers.
• lioeters
  This biography includes more information than I've seen elsewhere about the legendary programmer, who's been discussed time and again on this forum.
• Menu

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

  chubot
  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 modifyIn 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---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/
• jlundberg
  Bellard is such an inspiring programmer! A few of my favorites out of his works are:- qemu user mode- tcc- ts_zip
• kryptonomist
  So, LZEXE was written on an Amstrad PC1512 (of course in 8086 assembly).
• shevy-java
  With his recent release of MicroQuickJS, and also prior work, he kind of has to do epic things. People expect that of him.
• mdavid626
  Is Fabrice Bellard on HN?
• wazoox
  Back in 2004 I started using qemu to replace Bochs in my development, it was a huge help. My colleague sent an email to Fabrice to thank him and he replied very amicably. The guy is not only supremely competent, but absolutely unpretentious, nice and friendly.
• brcmthrowaway
  Do we think Bellard got rich, like antirez?
• maximgeorge
  [dead]
• Menu

  rurban
  (2009)
• YouAreWRONGtoo
  [dead]
• Menu

  dakiol
  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.