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Comments (144)

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  sph
  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.
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  leonidasrup
  "Fabrice Bellard" by Andy Gocke and Nick Pizzolatohttps://www.ipaidia.gr/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/117-2020-f...
• throwaway2037
  For those unaware, you can find Fabrice's website here: https://bellard.org/It has a full list of his projects.
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  cassianoleal
  > 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.
• p0w3n3d
  I'm a psychofan of Fabrice Bellard. He's unbeatable. He made DVB-T using VGA connector. It's like crazy!
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  evilturnip
  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.
• fguerraz
  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.
• kzrdude
  The picture appears to be real, if we trust this source:https://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/january/6/
• BLKNSLVR
  QEMU and FFMPEG!!Where would we be today without Fabrice?
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  jf
  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?
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  swiftcoder
  > 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
• bananaflag
  When I saw the title I first thought of Fabien Sanglard.
• j3th9n
  #howtomakethisaboutme "Almost certainly better than I am", eff off Carmack.
• throwa356262
  "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.
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  wiseowise
  Carmack replies to slop generated by slop account. What a time to be alive.
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  latexr
  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_BellardSurely 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”.
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  jdw64
  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?
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  hamburgererror
  > 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...
• ErroneousBosh
  "... 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.
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  tjpnz
  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?
• shevy-java
  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.
• asxndu
  [dead]
• huflungdung
  [dead]
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  self_awareness
  Fabrice Bellard is the actual greatest programmer that has ever lived.Carmack's "almost certainly" doesn't look good here.
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  rcastellotti
  remember when HN was interesting?
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  copperx
  "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?
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  pandaforce
  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.