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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.
My 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"
Maybe, but you could also look at it from another angle.
Taking something that’s traditionally been hard and making it dramatically easier, better, and faster unlocks pent-up downstream use-cases.
I’m sure it’s some degree of both selection and execution, but so many industries have been unlocked simply because somebody showed up and figured out how to make a previously difficult thing easy.
These are your 10x programmers.
Maybe 100x or more in Bertrand’s case.
It’s not about putting in 19 hour days or spitting out more lines of code or PRs or whatever.
It’s coming up with elegant solutions with broad impact that no one else even considered.
One way I like to think of it is that Fabrice creates prototypes interesting enough that other people choose to spend their entire careers maintaining them.
Often this is the conundrum in research as well. What should one spend their life working on? Especially if you want to make an impact. Choosing the right problem is often harder than coming up with a relevant solution.
> Deciding what to work on might be the most important question in life.
The flip side of this, is if you have the ability, you can just pick the hardest problem in your field, go solve it... rinse and repeat.
Everyone can find out what the hardest problems in their field are, it's not a secret, just a question of if you have the ability/gumption/willingness to go spend years of your life attacking a problem like that
This is the more striking thing. An meme I often repeat is that ideas are cheap, execution is key - there's a trope of "I have a great idea for an app, I just need a developer to do all the work", exacerbated with AI doing all the work.
But this guy is the opposite idea of that. In hindsight, sure, a library doing video is obvious. But the other ones? That's something else.
> Deciding what to work on might be the most important question in life.
Work on being a positive influence in the world. Help your neighbour when they are in need and fight for the rights of those less fortunate than yourself.
He also knows what to keep proprietary and monetize.
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.
For those unaware, you can find Fabrice's website here: https://bellard.org/
It has a full list of his projects.
"Fabrice Bellard" by Andy Gocke and Nick Pizzolato
https://www.ipaidia.gr/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/117-2020-f...
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.
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"
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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!
Little known Fabrice Bellard project. He worked with the ATSC to test the ATSC 3.0 PHY layer when he was consulting at DekTec.
Bellard is a genius. Carmack's modesty about his own genius is impressive too.
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.
I emailed Fabrice in early 2013 when I was starting wit.ai. He replied quickly with a very nice, humble, valuable response.
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).
The picture appears to be real, if we trust this source:
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.
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.
"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?
QEMU and FFMPEG!!
Where would we be today without Fabrice?
Aside, 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.
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?
I'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.
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.
When I saw the title I first thought of Fabien Sanglard.
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”.
Bellard seems to be at the extreme tail of the distribution of talent x grit/perseverance.
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.
Mildly funny that Carmack is quote tweeting a slop biography of Bellard from a pure AI slop account
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?
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.
"... 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.
> 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
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.
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.
Why bother with the long comments? Just go to http://bellard.org