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I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

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Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

#311

Post by cgh »

ryandrake wrote: post #211
hnlmorg wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the code quality is speed No it’s not. Code quality is just code quality. It's a subjective measure. eg how do you define one thing is of greater "quality" than another? Is it CPU ops? Memory footprint? Code readability? And how do you measure readability? By who? What I find readable someone else might not, and visa versa. If you’re making choices to improve development throughput then that’s fine. But so ofte…

This is one of the reasons I got away from writing commercial software and now only write code as a hobby. To me, the code itself is the product. I want the code to look like a beautiful painting—the fact that it does something is secondary. I’ll sit there for hours working on things like const correctness, and making sure each class has the bare minimum amount of state/instance variables, making sure function argume…

“Paints the back of the cabinet” is a great analogy. LLM-driven production is so far away from this mindset.

Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

#312

Post by TheAmazingRace »

Quarrel wrote: post #285
Zardoz84 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sad that him can't show the same respect for "Burguer" Rebecca Ann Heineman.

err? afaik Bellard never had any beef with Burger Becky. Both are legendary programmers, but somewhat different eras. I have no idea what you're suggesting.

I think he was referring to Carmack's note on Burger Becky when she passed away.

Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

#313

Post by stackedinserter »

pandaforce wrote: post #47

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 build…

Also it's worth mentioning that gstreamer is far more superior than ffmpeg, with its bindings, plugin architecture, control over stream (valves, tees, etc) and overall quality of code.

Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

#316

Post by lanstin »

ryandrake wrote: post #211
hnlmorg wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the code quality is speed No it’s not. Code quality is just code quality. It's a subjective measure. eg how do you define one thing is of greater "quality" than another? Is it CPU ops? Memory footprint? Code readability? And how do you measure readability? By who? What I find readable someone else might not, and visa versa. If you’re making choices to improve development throughput then that’s fine. But so ofte…

This is one of the reasons I got away from writing commercial software and now only write code as a hobby. To me, the code itself is the product. I want the code to look like a beautiful painting—the fact that it does something is secondary. I’ll sit there for hours working on things like const correctness, and making sure each class has the bare minimum amount of state/instance variables, making sure function argume…

Have you ever done research mathematics? To me, the only difference between code and math is that the code can do things, make stuff happens in the world; outside of that, mathematics has a lot more opportunities to be beautiful (not to say that there isn't beautiful code, but the beauty is not central in the way it often is in mathematics).

Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

#317

Post by d4rkp4ttern »

nixon_why69 wrote: post #267
nerdsniper wrote: post #264

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”

Horrible take given Bellard's lack of general recognition and also the situation in developed-nation-2026. There are 2 billion people not dying in cotton fields or sweatshops, you're not, where's your revolutionary free code that you gave to the world? Over half the planet gets a chance to prove they're smart in this day and age, between gaokao in China and whatever the exams are called in India, plus the western wor…

You're thinking of the legendary IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) JEE (Joint Entrance Exam).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Entrance_Examination

Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

#320

Post by HelloNurse »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #227
miki123211 wrote: post #185

It's interesting to me that most of Bellard's work is basically turning specs into C. His most important projects are ffmpeg (codec specs), qEmu (ISA specs), QuickJS (the EcmaScript spec), tinyC (the C spec), and his telecom company (LTE specs). I guess the pi calculations and neural network stuff are exceptions. Just to be clear, this doesn't make his work any less impressive. Highly performant codec and emulator im…

> ffmpeg (codec specs) if your mental model is that somebody writes codec specs and then fabrice bellard comes in and turns the specs into C, you are dead wrong. first of all, codecs are usually reverse-engineered, there is no spec. second of all, even when a well specified document describes the codec, that spec does not describe how to efficiently encode or decode with that codec. people like fabrice bellard develo…

Vocabulary please. A "codec" is software that CODes and DECodes multimedia content, while specs describe an encoded file or stream format (occasionally involving network protocols and other concerns).

In a normal standard development process experimental codecs come first, then those that have proved to work well, including having good enough performance, are described in the spec; after standardization there's very little room to "develop the algorithms" because nonconformant implementations would be useless.

Reverse engineering is limited to the abnormal case of having access to some codec but not to the standard that describes it.

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