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.
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
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.
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.
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.
.. 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 ..
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.
>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...
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. :(
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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).
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?
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.
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 linked tweet, or even the Wikipedia page?
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
.. 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 ..
It's separate from striving for "beautiful" code, beauty within well-factored boundaries yields dimishing returns compared to just having the boundaries.
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...
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.
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.
Really? I find his code elegant and concise.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.ipaidia.gr/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/117-2020-f...
I've always had a lot of admiration for Fabrice Bellard, I always wished I was as good an engineer as he is.
It has a full list of his projects.
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.
https://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/january/6/
Where would we be today without Fabrice?
... do tech people really not know who Fabrice Bellard is?
He's kind of a household name in a lot of programming circles
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.
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.
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.
>programming circles
Well, not all tech people are part of some curcles I guess.
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.
https://community.frame.work/t/framework-supporting-far-righ...
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.
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)
I stand by that decision, for various reasons.
Not least being that "Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby" gave me the ick.
Simple as that.
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”.
> 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...
> He is still shipping.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/schiffen#Etymology_2
:-P
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
Carmack's "almost certainly" doesn't look good here.
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?
2) avoid qualifiers in personal compliments (unless ironic)
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
You mean trademark. The copyright is owned 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.
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.
Most of the code in the linux kernel today is not from Linus.
I don't know ffmpeg but this resonates with my experience with other open source projects.
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.
On the real world, if it runs and solves their problem nobody gives a fucc. Period
Props on him.