Fabrice Bellard

Fabrice Bellard is a computer programmer who is best known as the creator of the FFmpeg and QEMU software projects. He has also developed a number of other programs, including the Tiny C Compiler.

He was born in 1972 in Grenoble, France and went to school in Lycée Joffre (Montpellier), where, at age 17, he created the famous executable compressor LZEXE. After studying at École Polytechnique, he went on to specialize at Télécom Paris in 1996.

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.

He has since continued his work writing software. In 2004, he wrote the TinyCC Boot Loader, which can compile and boot a Linux kernel from source in less than 15 seconds. 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. 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.

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