Well, wasn't Fabrice Bellard the guy who built a virtual machine with JS so that...

tombert · 2025-12-24T00:05:32 1766534732

Fabrice is an absolute legend. Most people would be content with just making QEMU, but this guy makes TinyC and FFmpeg and QuickJS and MicroQuickJS and a bunch of other huge projects.

I am envious that I will never anywhere near his level of productivity.

avaer · 2025-12-24T03:49:16 1766548156

Not to detract from his status as a legend, but I think the kind of person that singlehandedly makes one of these projects is exactly the kind of person that would make the others.

I forgot about FFmpeg (thanks for the reminder), but my first thought was "yup that makes perfect sense".

tombert · 2025-12-24T04:41:20 1766551280

Sure, they're not unrelated or anything, but at the same time, they're all really important, huge projects.

umvi · 2025-12-24T02:34:29 1766543669

Not just programming either; he invented a mathematical technique for calculating the nth hex digit of pi

keepamovin · 2025-12-24T04:30:39 1766550639

I know it's not true, but it would be funny if Bellard had access to AI for 15 years (time-traveler, independent invention, classified researcher) and that was the cause of his superhuman producitvity.

AI will let 10,000 Bellards bloom - or more.

kzrdude · 2025-12-23T23:28:55 1766532535

And thanks to that we can run Linux in a PDF as well..

anthk · 2025-12-24T08:29:18 1766564958

And FFMPEG, the standard codec suite for Unix today. And Qemu, the core of KVM. Plus TCC, a great small compiler compared to C/Clang altough cparser has better C99 coverage. Oh, and some DVB transmitter reusing the MHZ radiation from a computer screen by tweaking the Vidtune values from X. It's similar to what Tempest for Eliza does.