Fabrice Bellard

IRL Name: 
Fabrice Bellard
Biography: 

Fabrice Bellard is a computer programmer who is the founder and creator of ffmpeg, qemu projects and once a world record holder of holding the most number of digits found in pi. He has also developed a number of other programs, including the Tiny C Compiler.

Fabrice Bellard's entries won the International Obfuscated C Code Contest twice: In 2000, he won in the category "Most Specific Output for a program that implemented the modular Fast Fourier Transform and used it to compute the then biggest known prime number, 2^6972593-1; and in 2001, he won in the category "Best Abuse of the Rules" for a tiny compiler (the source code being only 3KB in size) of a strict subset of the C language for i386 Linux. The program itself is written in this language subset, i.e. it is self-hosting.

In 2011, he created a minimal PC emulator written in pure JavaScript. The emulated hardware consists of a 32-bit x86 compatible CPU, a 8259 Programmable Interrupt Controller, a 8254 Programmable Interrupt Timer, and a 16450 UART.

Facts

In 2011 he won a Google-O'Reilly Open Source Award.

At age 17, he created the executable compressor LZEXE.

He wrote the TinyCC Boot Loader, which can compile and boot a Linux kernel from source in less than 15 seconds.

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