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.

Please post it!

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?

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

"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...

Fair enough! He really is a remarkable guy.

This is exactly the same issue I had with the article about Foxconn, specifically the OP extracting a single sentence from a multi-page article and pasting it here without a shred of commentary. I can't stand copy-paste without any additional information or opinion being shared. It defeats the purpose of a forum.

p.s. I was downmodded at least -9 when I posted a similar reply to yours.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Epitome of a hacker.