

Fabrice Bellard - xtacy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard

======
Locke1689
I actually wrote a long (somewhere ~15 pages) paper on him in the style of the
CACM for an intro CS class. It turns out I've worked on a bunch of his
projects (FFmpeg, QEMU) so I thought finding out more about him would be
really interesting. It also includes a short interview. If anyone's interested
I can post it.

Edit: PDF: <http://commentout.net/media/fabrice.pdf>

Fair warning: I remember there were still some spelling and grammatical errors
in the final draft. The writing style is also a little fractured because I co-
wrote it with my roommate. The interview is cited but not included raw. I'll
see if I can find it in my email.

~~~
xtacy
Please post it!

------
japherwocky
OK, I'll bite: He has singlehandedly built a lot of incredibly useful
software. He's awesome.

Why are we linking to his wikipedia article? Am I missing some timely piece of
info?

~~~
xtacy
Nothing special. To me, it feels awesome to read about what he has done and
it's inspirational. I just wanted to share it.

~~~
gvb
"It's people like that who make you realize how little you've accomplished. It
is a sobering thought, for example, that when Mozart was my age, he had been
dead for two years."

Tom Lehrer

[http://thinkexist.com/quotation/it_is_a_sobering_thought_tha...](http://thinkexist.com/quotation/it_is_a_sobering_thought_that_when_mozart_was_my/225326.html)

------
djcapelis
His webpage provides a nice list of projects: <http://bellard.org/>

I agree with the poster, Fabrice Bellard is one of those amazing people that
should be better known but has been too busy quietly writing everything.

------
shin_lao
As clever as you think you might be, people like Fabrice remind you that there
is always someone out there to outsmart you.

------
pederb72
A personal hero for me as well. In addition to the projects listed in the
wikipedia article, I'd like to mention TinyGL (<http://bellard.org/TinyGL/>),
which was really useful for OpenGL on BeOS/BeBox (much faster than Mesa), and
qemacs (<http://bellard.org/qemacs/>) for editing really large text files.

------
nailer
Thanks for posting this. Fb belongs with jwz, linus and the other household
names for ffmpeg and qemu alone.

------
thibaut_barrere
For me, Fabrice remains the author of LZEXE [1], a tool that I found
technically amazing at the time, very useful to meet the "64kb intro limit"
back in those days.

[1] <http://bellard.org/lzexe.html>

------
heresy
Epitome of a hacker.

