Fabrice Bellard | |
|---|---|
| Born | (1972-06-17)June 17, 1972 (age 53) Grenoble, France |
| Alma mater | École Polytechnique |
| Occupations | Co-founder andCTO, Amarisoft[1] |
| Known for | QEMU,FFmpeg,Tiny C Compiler,Bellard's formula |
| Website | bellard |
Fabrice Bellard (French pronunciation:[fa.bʁisbɛ.laʁ]; born 1972) is a Frenchcomputer programmer known for writingFFmpeg,QEMU, and theTiny C Compiler. He developedBellard's formula for calculating single digits ofpi. In 2012, Bellard co-founded Amarisoft, atelecommunications company, with Franck Spinelli.
Bellard was born in 1972 inGrenoble, France and went to school in Lycée Joffre (Montpellier), where, at age 17, he created theexecutable compressor LZEXE.[2] After studying atÉcole Polytechnique, he went on to specialize atTélécom Paris in 1996.
In 1997, he discovered a new, faster formula to calculate single digits ofpi inhexadecimal representation, known asBellard's formula. It is a variant of theBailey–Borwein–Plouffe formula.
Bellard's entries won theInternational Obfuscated C Code Contest three times.[3] In 2000, he won in the category "Most Specific Output"[4] for a program that implemented the modularfast Fourier transform and used it to compute the then biggest knownprime number, 26972593−1 (in the sense that it prints the decimal representation of this number, which itself is assumed to be known).[5] In 2001, he won in the category "Best Abuse of the Rules" for a tinycompiler (thesource code being only 3 kB in size) of a strict subset of theC language for i386Linux. The program itself is written in this language subset, i.e. it isself-hosting. In 2018, he won in the category "Most inflationary"[6] for an image decompression program.[7]
In 2000, he started the FFmpeg project (using thepseudonym "Gérard Lantau") and led it until 2003[8].
In 2002, he developed TinyGL, a subset ofOpenGL suitable for embedded environments.
In 2003, he pushed the first commits ofQEMU, developing it solo through v0.7.1 in 2005.[9]
In 2004, he wrote the TinyCC Boot Loader, which can compile and boot a Linux kernel from source in less than 15 seconds.[10] In 2005, he designed a system that could act as an Analog orDVB-TDigital TV transmitter by directly generating a VHF signal from a standard PC and VGA card.[11] In 2011, he created a minimal PC emulator written in pureJavaScript. The emulated hardware consists of a32-bitx86 compatibleCPU, a8259 Programmable Interrupt Controller, a8254 Programmable Interrupt Timer, and a16450 UART.[12]
On 31 December 2009, he claimed the world record for calculations of pi, having calculated it to nearly 2.7 trillion places in 90 days.Slashdot wrote: "While the improvement may seem small, it is an outstanding achievement because only a single desktop PC, costing less than US$3,000, was used—instead of a multi-million dollar supercomputer as in the previous records."[13][14] On 2 August 2010, this record waseclipsed by Shigeru Kondo who computed 5 trillion digits, although this was done using a server-class machine running dual Intel Xeon processors, equipped with 96 GB of RAM.
In 2011, he won anO'Reilly Open Source Award.[15]
In 2014, he proposed theBetter Portable Graphics (BPG) image format as a replacement forJPEG.[16]
In July 2019, he released QuickJS, a small and embeddable JavaScript engine.[17]
In April 2021, hisartificial neural network–based data compressor, NNCP, took first place out of hundreds in the Large Text Compression Benchmark.[18] The compressor uses Bellard's own artificial neural network library, LibNC ("C Library forTensor Manipulation"), which is publicly available.[19]
In August 2023, Bellard released ts_zip, a lossless text compressor using alarge language model.[20] He updated it in March 2024, making the algorithm considerably faster as well as hardware-independent.[21]
In April 2024, Bellard released TSAC, an audio compression utility that can achieve very low bitrates of 5.5kbit/s (mono) or 7.5kbit/s (stereo) while still preserving reasonable audio quality at 44.1 kHz.[22]
In December 2025, Bellard released MicroQuickJS, a Javascript engine targeted at embedded systems. It compiles and runs Javascript programs with as low as 10 kB of RAM at speeds comparable to QuickJS.[23]
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)