181–190 of 594 posts
If there were a software engineering hall of fame, I nominate Fabrice.
There is! ACM grants several awards for scientists and more. One such award is the Turing Award [1], given "for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Award
AIUI the Turing award is primarily CS focused.
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Don't forget his LLM based text compression software that won awards. Guy is a genius. I hope he tries Rust someday
Fabrice, if you're reading this, please consider replacing Rust instead with your own memory safe language. The design intent of Rust is a powerful idea, and Rust is the best of its class, but the language itself is under-specified[1] which prevents basic, provably-correct optimizations[0]. At a technical level, Rust could be amended to address these problems, but at a social level, there are now too many people who…
I wish for this new year we reboot the Web with a super light standard and accompanying ecosystem with - A small and efficient JS subset, HTML, CSS - A family of very simple browsers that do just that - A new Web that adheres to the above That would make my year.
Lots of comments talking about how existing browsers can already do this, but the big benefit that current browsers can't give you is the sheer level of speed and efficiency that a highly restricted "lite web" browser could achieve, especially if the restrictions are made with efficiency in mind. The embedded use case is obvious, but it'd also be excellent for things like documentation — with such a browser you could…
If this had been available in 2010, Redis scripting would have been JavaScript and not Lua. Lua was chosen based on the implementation requirements, not on the language ones... (small, fast, ANSI-C). I appreciate certain ideas in Lua, and people love it, but I was never able to like Lua, because it departs from a more Algol-like syntax and semantics without good reasons, for my taste. This creates friction for newcom…
> it feels like it departs from what people know without good reasons. Lua is a pretty old language. In 1993 the world had not really settled on C style syntax. Compared to Perl or Tcl, Lua's syntax seems rather conventional. Some design decisions might be a bit unusual, but overall the language feels very consistent and predictable. JS is a mess in comparison. > because it departs from a more Algol-like syntax Huh?…
That's what matters to me, not how similar Lua is to other languages, but that the language is well-designed in its own system of rules and conventions. It makes sense, every part of it contributes to a harmonious whole. JavaScript on the other hand.
When speaking of Algol or C-style syntax, it makes me imagine a "Common C" syntax, like taking the best, or the least common denominator, of all C-like languages. A minimal subset that fits in your head, instead of what modern C is turning out to be, not to mention C++ or Rust.
Fabrice Bellard is widely considered one of the most productive and versatile programmers alive: - FFmpeg: https://bellard.org - QEMU: https://bellard.org/qemu/ - JSLinux: https://bellard.org/jslinux/ - TCC: https://bellard.org/tcc/ - QuickJS: https://bellard.org/quickjs/ Legendary.
Funny how people know Fabrice for all the software stuff but none of the hardware antics: played with implementing analog modem DSP in software in 1999 (linmodem is ~50-80% there, sadly never finished) probably leading to played with implementing SDR (again DSP) using VGA output to transmit DVB-T/NTSC/PAL in 2005 probably leading to Amarisoft SDR 5G base station, commercial product started in 2012 - his current job h…
People talk about how productive Fabrice Bellard is, but I don't think anyone appreciates just how productive he is. Here's the commit history for this project b700a4d (2025-12-22T1420) - Creates an empty project with an MIT license 295a36b (2025-12-22T1432) - Implements the JavaScript engine, the C API, the REPL, and all documentation He went from zero to a complete JS implementation in just 12 minutes ! I couldn't…
That doesn't mean anything. I quite often start with writing a proof-of-concept, and only initialize the git repository when I'm confident the POC will actually lead to something useful. Common sense says that those files already existed at the time of the first commit.
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For all the praise he gets here, few seem interested in his methods: writing complete programs, based on robust computer science, with minimal dependencies and tooling.
When I first read the source for his original QuickJS implementation I was amazed to discover he created the entirety of JavaScript in a single xxx thousand line C file (more or less). That was a sort of defining moment in my personal coding; a lot of my websites and apps are now single file source wherever possible/practical.
$ wc -l ...
265908 sqlite-amalgamation-3510100/sqlite3.c
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rare occasion where he gained a legendary status based purely on his work, I dont think I ever saw even a written interview with the guy
He is a private man that does not like the spotlight IIUC. He refuses most requests for interviews, but they do exist. https://www.macplus.net/depeche-82364-interview-le-createur-... https://www.mo4tech.com/fabrice-bellard-one-man-is-worth-a-t... (few quotes, more like a profile piece) He keeps a low profile and let his work speak for itself. He really is brilliant.
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I think many subscribe to this philosophy: https://distantprovince.by/posts/its-rude-to-show-ai-output-... Your github research/ links are an interesting case of this. On one hand, late AI adopters may appreciate your example prompts and outputs. But it feels like trivially reproducible noise to expert LLM users, especially if they are unaware of your reputation for substantive work. The HN AI pushback then drowns ou…
Yeah, I agree that it's rude to show AI output to people... in most cases (and 100% if you don't disclose it.) My simonw/research GitHub repo is deliberately separate from everything else I do because it's entirely AI-generated. I wrote about that here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/6/async-code-research/#th... This particular case is a very solid use-case for that approach though. There are a ton of important q…
I'd chalk up the -4 to generic LLM hate, but I find examples of where LLMs do well to be useful, so I appreciated your post. It displays curiosity, and is especially defensible given your site has no ads, loads blazingly fast, and is filled with HN-relevant content, and doesn't even attempt to sell anything.