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.

• keyle

  today at 7:46 AM

  No 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.

  • today at 8:06 AM

  • coldtea

    today at 8:07 AM

    Parent knows. He makes an analogy, not an absolute equivalence.

    • bravetraveler

      today at 8:20 AM

      They know, criticizing without equivocating.

      • alfiedotwtf

        today at 8:34 AM

        This thread is why he is not on Twitter

        • bravetraveler

          today at 8:34 AM

          Fascinating, I'm not there for other reasons. So, about that costly Tea...

• Zardoz84

  today at 9:21 AM

  Sad that him can't show the same respect for "Burguer" Rebecca Ann Heineman.

• bitwize

  today at 6:19 AM

  As I say, Bellard is Mozart when most of us can't even hope to be Salieri.

  • audunw

    today at 7:38 AM

    Mozart 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

    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.

    • hnlmorg

      today at 8:02 AM

      I 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.

      • 21asdffdsa12

        today at 8:09 AM

        But the code quality is speed. And reach. You can not advance, unless you can read the code, you can understand the model, you can not scale beyond a certain point. The beauty of the architecture is the ability to build a spaceship compared to a train of kerosene tankers. Physically similar, but in capability radical different.

        I find this very scary. Somebody unable to perceive capabilities and tech-debt. If you can not perceive that- you should not be let near executive decisions or code-base evaluation. This is literally the difference between rocket-science and exploding failed projects. Everyone can pile up explosives, not everyone can go to space today.

        Its a great interview topic to filter this kind of candidate out of companies.

        • hnlmorg

          today at 9:15 AM

          > But the code quality is speed

          No it’s not. Code quality is just code quality. It's a subjective measure. eg how do you define one thing is of greater "quality" than another? Is it CPU ops? Memory footprint? Code readability? And how do you measure readability? By who? What I find readable someone else might not, and visa versa.

          If you’re making choices to improve development throughput then that’s fine. But so often I see developers architecting code for what they mistakenly think will improve their throughput but ultimately they spend longer on writing those abstractions than any time they have saved when using them.

          XKCD parodies this problem with their pass the salt sketch: https://xkcd.com/974/

          Sometimes this comes down to developer vanity, sometimes it comes down to poor alignment of goals and/or communication between the product teams and development teams. And sometimes it’s just because solving problems is fun so naturally we’ll look for problems to solve. But whatever the reasons, I’ve personally seen this happen (as well as being a victim of it myself) enough times to know it is an underestimated problem.

          > I find this very scary. Somebody unable to perceive capabilities and tech-debt. If you can not perceive that- you should not be let near executive decisions or code-base evaluation.

          This is a rather insulting assumption. I've been a tech lead for around 2 decades now and have worked on plenty of brownfield projects in that time. I know what tech debt looks like.

          The problem with "tech debt" is it can mean anything from "this is ugly code that takes 5 minutes longer to read but it works well" to "this in a insecure/unstable pile of horse manure and customers will start to notice".

          The latter is where time should be spent. The former is a vanity project that doesn't bring the business any value.

          That's not to say that developers shouldn't ever spend time on the former examples of tech debt, just that it's of a lower priority than getting the project working.

        • MomsAVoxell

          today at 8:33 AM

          “You can read the code”

          .. is very, very important in the context of milliseconds, hours, days, weeks, months and years. And decades.

          Today, you might say that John/Fabrice’ code is readable/unreadable, but will that also be true in 5 years time, in a different cultural/technological era?

          Obviously yes in the case of these individuals - because the ecosystem their products have created is self-sustaining at a mass (consumer/social) level.

          I’ve built software which has shipped and effected the lives of millions, too. Many of us have.

          But I have not built a massive ecosystem by working on the right software which was adopted by millions of developers who read my code, was inspired by it, and used it for something in their own products - thus creating sub-ecosystems upon sub-ecosystems, a big sprawling tree of economy which spreads out into the mass of humanity who use technology.

          In this story we have two cases of individuals who have accomplished an extraordinary reach of software, in their own uniquely flavored ways - and this demonstrates that there are no absolute requirements to strip personality from the code - as long as its damn good code in the first place.

          >filter candidates out of companies

          It’s a great way to decide not to work at a company which managers do not understand the importance of architecture at various scales, milliseconds, seconds, hours, days, weeks ..

      • nixon_why69

        today at 8:21 AM

        It's the opposite, better-factored code makes me, a mediocre developer, capable of making progress instead of hitting a complexity wall.

        It's separate from striving for "beautiful" code, beauty within well-factored boundaries yields dimishing returns compared to just having the boundaries.

        • hnlmorg

          today at 9:03 AM

          You’re ostensibly arguing the same thing I am though. Focusing on building the thing rather than designing the code to look pretty.

    • coldtea

      today at 8:10 AM

      >Mozart 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.

      Pedantic much? It's not about him writing elegant code like someone would write elegant music. It's a comparison about the skill level achieved, Mozart-level vs Salieri-level (and in the sense of their Amadeus movie rivalry, not real world).

      His code tackles very complex subjects, succesfully, with huge technical skill, and has been reliable and relied upon by millions...

    • sph

      today at 8:44 AM

      > 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.

      There’s few things I find more pathetic than trying really hard to show who’s best and ranking things that have no business being ranked.

      You will find humans are n-dimensional and elude these simplistic categories.

      • yaantc

        today at 9:09 AM

        Yes, ranking requires reducing to a single dimension where all interesting things are multi-dimensions. This is a lossy process, which often tells more about the one(s) doing the ranking than what's ranked.

    • vkazanov

      today at 8:02 AM

      True. 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

      today at 8:02 AM

      "It’s not beautiful but that’s OK."

      Really? I find his code elegant and concise.

  • pwdisswordfishq

    today at 8:48 AM

    Obsessed with poop?

• gaigalas

  today at 7:09 AM

  Honestly, 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.

  • noisy_boy

    today at 8:47 AM

    Telling stories, looking for gods that don't have our limitations and telling stories about those gods is pretty much in our nature irrespective of the era.

    • gaigalas

      today at 9:03 AM

      There's no such thing as "human nature", that's just a way to justify something that can't be easily explained.

      I have nothing against it. The fact that I explained a mechanism (mythologizing diminishes one's real work) offends people who like to do it, but that's outside of my control. It's not meant to offend or deny their right to do it. It is just what it is and I'm naming it. I understand it's uncomfortable, and pulling the "everyone does it" card makes things easier.

      I love mythology by the way, stories, etc. Fascinating stuff.

      • noisy_boy

        today at 9:23 AM

        I don't even know what are you arguing against.

        > I love mythology by the way, stories, etc. Fascinating stuff.

        Most people do. Given that it is quite prevalent across cultures and given that we are a product of our genetics and upbringing, one might even say, in our nature.

        • gaigalas

          today at 9:34 AM

          I think it's the wrong lens for observing this conversation. You're looking for something that I might be attacking. I'm not doing what you think I am, that's why you can't pinpoint it.

          It's a simple observation: mythologizing might diminish one's work.

          Even if we assume there's some "human nature", that claim stands unchallenged.

          "But you can't fight this thing that all humans do" is your line, and it was never my point to fight it. I want to explain what it does, not change it (which is outside of my control).

  • noufalibrahim

    today at 8:10 AM

    Not exactly my idea. However, it's pleasant to see two people I admire so much having respect for each other.

  • MomsAVoxell

    today at 8:36 AM

    Oh, 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

      today at 8:57 AM

      Humanity 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.

• shevy-java

  today at 6:37 AM

  I imagined him with wild, long hair; possibly tattoos, huge and heavy set. The picture destroyed my imagination - and now I want my imagination back. :(

  • throwaway2037

    today at 8:18 AM

    In 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.

  • taway20260616

    today at 7:28 AM

    If you want your "imagination" back, go back to watching Netflix and Hollywood cliches.

  • sph

    today at 7:06 AM

    Except the ‘huge and heavy set’, you’re thinking of tokyospliff here.

    • huhtenberg

      today at 8:00 AM

      Or some version of RMS :)

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

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...

• ShinyLeftPad

  today at 9:02 AM

  It's pretty dated since he's done more stuff since!

• throwaway2037

  today at 8:18 AM

  Jesus... has that ever been submitted to HN!? It should be.

  • leonidasrup

    today at 8:45 AM

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46377862

> 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.

• astqs

  today at 9:29 AM

  It will tank usage dramatically tbh.

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

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.

• shevy-java

  today at 6:36 AM

  I 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

    today at 7:04 AM

    He's basically a rock star here. (And well deservedly so.)

• brcmthrowaway

  today at 6:37 AM

  They can't hear you, they're on a yacht

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.

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

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

QEMU and FFMPEG!!

Where would we be today without Fabrice?

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?

• Zealotux

  today at 8:23 AM

  He 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-...

> 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

• edarchis

  today at 6:56 AM

  I'll be honest. I discovered him with this post. And I studied in France. I am also familiar with his projects, the obfuscated C code contest and more. Just don't remember seeing his name.

  I guess that if people aren't loud on social media, people tend to ignore them.

  Respect to those who posted their praise of someone else on social media. We need more of this.

• keyle

  today at 7:47 AM

  I've been around for a long time and I know of him. Most people don't bother looking up where stuff comes from.

• pantulis

  today at 7:36 AM

  He's a lifelong familiar name since the LZEXE days.

• _zoltan_

  today at 6:52 AM

  no, most people wouldn't know. you're in an echo chamber if you think he is well known.

  • dgellow

    today at 7:36 AM

    Can we stop calling every niche an echo chamber?

    • AussieWog93

      today at 7:50 AM

      It is an echo chamber if you think your niche is universal though.

• theshrike79

  today at 6:46 AM

  I have an explicit rule not to meet or look up my heroes. Been burned way too many times.

  I don't need to know who is building VLC, curl, ffmpeg or any of the other essentials in my life. I just appreciate their work and pitch in some money if possible.

  • t-3

    today at 7:34 AM

    If you don't put them on a pedestal, you won't ever be crushed when they can't stay on top of it. Appreciating people and the results of people's work doesn't require worship. People don't have to be perfect or even good to make good things. Coming to terms with this and being able to take people as they are instead of how you want them to be is just another part of growing up and leaving behind childish attachments.

  • bonzini

    today at 6:59 AM

    You'd be fine with Daniel Stenberg. :)

    • theshrike79

      today at 7:34 AM

      There are multiple people I'm fine with in software circles - Daniel being one of them, but then we have Notch and DHH who used to be cool, but some of their current hot takes are kinda oof.

      Specifically way too many authors whose books I've loved have turned out to be not very good human beings. David Eddings and Neil Gaiman are pretty good examples of this.

• konart

  today at 7:00 AM

  First time hearing the name too.

  >programming circles

  Well, not all tech people are part of some curcles I guess.

• ErroneousBosh

  today at 7:33 AM

  And you can just email him. He's just this guy, that writes stuff, and likes to help answer questions about it.

• pdpi

  today at 6:44 AM

  "Tech people" aren't one single homogeneous mass. His name is unlikely to show up in the same conversation as, say, DHH.

  • defrost

    today at 6:57 AM

    That's understood in the comment which explicitly indicates that there are many programming circles and that Bellard is known in a number of them (but not all).

    eg: I grew up in the Australian Kimberley region (kind of remote), spent decades in geophysical mapping, multi channel data processing, computational algebra, and other odd niches, have no real interest in SV, and am quite familiar with Bellard's work.

    No idea who DHH is though.

    • a96

      today at 7:19 AM

      https://tekin.co.uk/2025/09/the-ruby-community-has-a-dhh-pro...

      https://community.frame.work/t/framework-supporting-far-righ...

      • account42

        today at 8:22 AM

        That validates his point - barely anyone outside the ruby community would even know about DHH if he didn't manage to trigger the eternally outraged.

  • jdsnape

    today at 6:48 AM

    I knew of Fabrice, and have admired him for many years…but who is DHH?

    • Bigpet

      today at 7:05 AM

      If 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

        today at 7:12 AM

        TBH 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)

      • hdgvhicv

        today at 8:00 AM

        Ru y was something that one guy tinkered with briefly. It was less used than Perl. Java and php was what tools were built in at my company.

      • ErroneousBosh

        today at 7:35 AM

        There was a big RoR scene in Glasgow in the mid-2000s, but there were a few of us that were resolutely Django.

        I stand by that decision, for various reasons.

        Not least being that "Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby" gave me the ick.

    • swiftcoder

      today at 9:25 AM

      To be fair, I don't think anyone outside the Ruby community knew who DHH was until his politics went viral on twitter

    • konart

      today at 7:01 AM

      Ruby on Rails creator (among other things).

    • today at 7:50 AM

    • noufalibrahim

      today at 7:32 AM

      DHH markets himself much better. His company (basecamp), in a sense, revolves around his public persona and he's unapologetic about this. It's the same with all of his projects (e.g. Omarchy recently).

    • otabdeveloper4

      today at 7:02 AM

      Yeah, same.

  • _zoltan_

    today at 6:53 AM

    DHH is even less known, don't kid yourself.

    • ErroneousBosh

      today at 7:34 AM

      Oh DHH is well known. We all know about DHH.

      • DonHopkins

        today at 9:00 AM

        Just that he's a douchebag, not what the letters stand for.

  • hdgvhicv

    today at 7:59 AM

    What is a DHH? A person?

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

#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.

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

• csomar

  today at 8:20 AM

  Yeah, I can't finish reading tweet. Is that even made for human consumption?

  • aembleton

    today at 9:12 AM

    Yes, whats wrong with it?

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”.

• menaerus

  today at 8:40 AM

  The 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.

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?

• alecco

  today at 7:54 AM

  The 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.

• smallstepforman

  today at 8:00 AM

  Find an itch, then scratch it. If many people have the same itch and can use your solution, you win.

  Simple as that.

• ivanjermakov

  today at 7:59 AM

  Find a problem and work on a solution for 20+ years.

• EugeneOZ

  today at 7:37 AM

  Start fixing the unfixable and doing the undoable things ;)

> 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...

• grokys

  today at 7:42 AM

  Pretty sure this is just AI writing style, and yes it's a huge turnoff.

• st_goliath

  today at 7:47 AM

  > He kept going.

  > He is still shipping.

  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/schiffen#Etymology_2

  :-P

• latexr

  today at 7:40 AM

  My “favourite” was “a project called JSLinux that engineers still cannot believe is real”. Such dumb hyperbole.

• circus1540

  today at 8:00 AM

  He 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.

• infofarmer

  today at 7:30 AM

  Obviously an LLM and sad Carmack engages with slop to normalize it.

"... 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.

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?

• Tade0

  today at 7:02 AM

  Presumably 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.

• thibaut_barrere

  today at 7:18 AM

  There’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.

  • u1hcw9nx

    today at 7:49 AM

    You 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.

  • gitanovic

    today at 7:34 AM

    Salvatore Sanfilippo (a.k.a. Antirez) exhibit B

• croes

  today at 7:19 AM

  Some assume that everything noteworthy regarding the internet is SV based.

• dofm

  today at 7:17 AM

  I had assumed it was slop but whether or not it is, that is kind of a revealing default isn't it?

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.

[dead]

[dead]

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

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

• dude250711

  today at 9:02 AM

  The actual greatest programmer is the one who gets compensated according to their output.

  • self_awareness

    today at 9:16 AM

    No, that's a regular programmer.

remember when HN was interesting?

• ErroneousBosh

  today at 7:37 AM

  It 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

  today at 7:54 AM

  Pepperidge Farms remembers...

"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?

• sevg

  today at 6:40 AM

  He says that Bellard is a better overall programmer, and for some reason you take this as evidence of a lack of humility?

• manmal

  today at 7:13 AM

  Carmack might think that there are certain areas he will be better due to decades of experience. Overall programmer isn’t a bad qualifier at all, it’s actually making it sound less offhand and more honest.

  • dofm

    today at 7:16 AM

    1) Bellard is

    2) avoid qualifiers in personal compliments (unless ironic)

    • DonHopkins

      today at 9:29 AM

      "You will be lucky to get this man to work for you."

• evilturnip

  today at 6:29 AM

  I suspect being a "better programmer" cannot be said unequivocally at their level. At that percentile of achievement, it depends on the specific dimension you are talking about. It's true of the highest skill in any field.

  • fnordpiglet

    today at 6:39 AM

    I more suspect he is not just a better programmer but has a two orders of magnitude smaller ego.

• account42

  today at 8:33 AM

  It's just a tweet, no need to over-analyze everything.

• audunw

  today at 7:55 AM

  Depends on what we mean by programmer.

  Fabrice is more clever and faster, I guess.

  But John Carmack is in my mind a better software engineer. He writes elegant code that can be used and maintained for a long time. At least from Quake 2ish, but you can see signs of solid code architecture already in Doom.

  Doom code will live almost as-is forever. The code Fabrice wrote for ffmpeg has been entirely replaced

• KeplerBoy

  today at 6:26 AM

  True, 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.

  • vkazanov

    today at 6:57 AM

    Well, 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

      today at 7:02 AM

      He is also a mathematician, having invented a new algorithm for calculating the digits of pi

      • nickcw

        today at 7:47 AM

        Here is his paper on it which is a little 2 pager:

        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!

    • today at 7:26 AM

  • cloudfudge

    today at 7:01 AM

    I think "he's almost certainly a better programmer than me" is a double form of humility: first, he's assuming that Fabrice Bellard is a better programmer than him based on the evidence and reputation, but he's also admitting that he doesn't have direct knowledge of this. Hence "almost certainly."

  • saidnooneever

    today at 6:29 AM

    its because carmacl enjoys a lot of fame around his tricks. ppl get like that.

• jimbob45

  today at 8:20 AM

  You’re not the only one who noticed. I think the unspoken idea is that Carmack thinks he’s better without ever having met him or seen his code at all. That deserves a few qualifiers.

• keybored

  today at 7:40 AM

  Carmack seems arrogant[1]. Which is why I take that statement as high praise.

  It’s also a nod to his own fame.

  [1] This is based on Masters of Doom. And the anecdotes are probably from the 90’s. And being arrogant does not mean that being confident in one’s ability is unjustified or that they are in fact not skilled. Being arrogant and being highly skilled are completely orthogonal.

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.

• nasretdinov

  today at 9:27 AM

  1. I don't believe anyone in their right mind thinks that ffmpeg is still maintained and developed by a single person, and definitely not by Fabrice 2. Spaghetti code or not matters very little, especially in the beginning, before you even know or understand the scope of the project and what it can become in the future. You can indeed refactor code when you understand the requirements better, and it's great that it's what the community did. I still think it was the right call to start with the spaghetti mess to not be dragged down by potential future problems that might never materialise because your project became something very different from what you originally had in mind

• mkl

  today at 7:51 AM

  > These days all he does is hold the copyright

  You mean trademark. The copyright is held by the authors of the code (or their employer, etc.), since there is no copyright assignment requirement.

  This is similar to how Linus Torvalds owns the "Linux" trademark (in some jurisdictions), but the copyright mostly belongs to other contributors.

• Beretta_Vexee

  today at 7:47 AM

  We mustn’t forget the context: FFmpeg and Videolan got their start in dorm rooms, where students used them to stream TV in the dorm and share movies.

  The Polytechnique and École Centrale campuses are just a few kilometers apart, and both projects began around 1997–1998.

  I don’t know about you, but as a student, I was too busy drinking beer to write clean code.

• lnsru

  today at 7:43 AM

  What 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

  today at 7:44 AM

  Thanks, 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.

• jdw64

  today at 7:39 AM

  You 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

• alecco

  today at 7:50 AM

  I just found this comment from 15y ago on the ffmpeg/libav drama: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/vvdxn/comment/c57zdk...

  I don't know ffmpeg but this resonates with my experience with other open source projects.

  • account42

    today at 8:05 AM

    Sounds about right. Don't know about the internal politics around the original maintainer but the libav folks never seemed right to me. I was glad at the time that the distro I was using left the choice up to the user.

    As far as the accusations against both rejecting patches and/or rewriting the code themselves goes I can empathize. It's not always easy to take on maintenance of code that isn't written like you want it to, even if the difference is ultimately immaterial. Sucks when this happens to a fundamental project that is used everywhere though. A good maintainer does need to have some ego but not too much it seems.

• doppp

  today at 7:32 AM

  You alright, mate?

• raverbashing

  today at 7:52 AM

  The psyop about "only shipping clean code" has been a big drag on projects

  On the real world, if it runs and solves their problem nobody gives a fucc. Period

  Props on him.

• wiseowise

  today at 8:10 AM

  No, bro, you don’t understand. He’s a messiah, God Emperor, a visionary, a prophet, an omnissiah running the internet, because social media kids grew up with the idea that they need some kind of idol to do something. Don’t know what causes this defect, but it is certainly a hard pill to swallow that most of the things in life are done by a combination of armies of people and chances of becoming one of those “rockstars” are as slim as being hit by an asteroid. So they resort to huffing a copium that you “just ship more bro, one more commit and you’ll be the musk bro, I promise bro”.

• thedevilslawyer

  today at 7:33 AM

  That's just, like, your opinion man