Fabrice Bellard
French computer programmer
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Fabrice Bellard (French pronunciation: [fa.bʁis bɛ.laʁ]; born 1972) is a French computer programmer known for writing FFmpeg, QEMU, and the Tiny C Compiler. He developed Bellard's formula for calculating single digits of pi. In 2012, Bellard co-founded Amarisoft, a telecommunications company, with Franck Spinelli.
Fabrice Bellard | |
|---|---|
| Born | June 17, 1972 Grenoble, France |
| Alma mater | École Polytechnique |
| Occupations | Co-founder and CTO, Amarisoft[1] |
| Known for | QEMU, FFmpeg, Tiny C Compiler, Bellard's formula |
| Website | bellard |
Life and career
Bellard was born in 1972 in Grenoble, France and went to school in Lycée Joffre (Montpellier), where, at age 17, he created the executable compressor LZEXE.[2] After studying at École Polytechnique, he went on to specialize at Télécom Paris in 1996.
In 1997, he discovered a new, faster formula to calculate single digits of pi in hexadecimal representation, known as Bellard's formula. It is a variant of the Bailey–Borwein–Plouffe formula.
Bellard's entries won the International Obfuscated C Code Contest three times.[3] In 2000, he won in the category "Most Specific Output"[4] for a program that implemented the modular fast Fourier transform and used it to compute the then biggest known prime 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 tiny compiler (the source code being only 3 kB 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 2018, he won in the category "Most inflationary"[6] for an image decompression program.[7]
In 2000, he started the FFmpeg project (using the pseudonym "Gérard Lantau") and led it until 2003[8].
In 2002, he developed TinyGL, a subset of OpenGL suitable for embedded environments.
In 2003, he pushed the first commits of QEMU, 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 or DVB-T Digital 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 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.[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 was eclipsed 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 an O'Reilly Open Source Award.[15]
In 2014, he proposed the Better Portable Graphics (BPG) image format as a replacement for JPEG.[16]
In July 2019, he released QuickJS, a small and embeddable JavaScript engine.[17]
In April 2021, his artificial 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 for Tensor Manipulation"), which is publicly available.[19]
In August 2023, Bellard released ts_zip, a lossless text compressor using a large 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]