If someone told you that a programmer had written a soft base station in just 10 months, you would think it was impossible, because it was the work of hundreds of people, and it had to be an elite team, how could it be done by one person?

Fabrice Bellard is one of those geniuses who, on their own, can achieve in a short period of time what would take years or even a lifetime to achieve.

Fabrice Bellard, French programmer genius

Hecker News has this review of Fabrice Bellard:

 

In many people’s eyes, Bellard is a non-human being who seems to possess some kind of superpower that pushes him beyond the limits of what humans can achieve.

Talent childhood

Bellard was born in 1972 in Grenoble, France. Bellard showed a strong interest in electronics when he babbled, and the first words out of his mouth were “tape recorder.”

Having grown up well, Bellard had access to technology and electronics.

At age 9, he began practicing coding skills on a TI-59 calculator, a programmable electronic calculator.

At age 11, the family bought its first home computer, the TI-99/4A, and Bellard began learning to program with the TI BASICS that came with his brain.

At age 15, he owned his first personal computer, the Amstrad PC1512, and it was on this computer that Bellard found his first success.

Accidental fame

In 1989, while still in high school, Bellard developed LZEXE, an executable compression program that compresses executable files into smaller, self-extracting forms under MS-DOS. On his website, he describes the situation this way:

“I developed LZEXE between 1989 and 1990, when I was 17 years old. Hard drives were small and expensive. I only had two floppy disks on my computer at the time (a 5-inch floppy disk was 360K), so saving space was a big problem for me.

I developed LZEXE mainly for my own use and later gave it to some friends. It ended up on the BULLETIN board and became famous all of a sudden. I didn’t do anything about it and it was completely unexpected.”

Superman’s achievement

From LZEXE, Bellard begins his path to canonization.

In 1996, while working as an intern at IRISA, a French computer science institute, Bellard wrote a Java environment called Harissa that included a Java virtual machine and a powerful compiler, Hec, that generated C code that could be compiled into efficient native code. This year, he was only 24 years old.

In 1997, he discovered a new formula for calculating PI faster, the Bellard formula for calculating the NTH binary number of PI. It was a variation of the Bailey-Borwein-Plouffe formula (BBP formula), but it was 43 percent faster.

Bellard has won the IOCCC competition three times ** (International C Language Mess Code Competition) ** :

The International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC) is an International programming Contest that aims to create The most creative and confusing C Code within a limit of 4 KB.

In 2000, he developed a program that implemented a modular fast Fourier transform and used it to print the largest known prime number at the time.

In 2001, he wrote a subset of C compiler running on I386 Linux — OTCC, its source code size is only 3 KB, TinyCC later developed from this work.

In 2018, he developed a picture decoder, a program with only 4KB of source code that could decode the famous “Lena” test images at 128 x 128 resolution.

IOCCC official website for Fabrice Bellard award records

Among Bellard’s many achievements, FFmpeg and QEMU are best known. Bellard himself considers FFmpeg and QEMU to be his two most important projects to date.

In 2000, Fabrice Bellard, under the pseudonym Gerard Lantau, launched FFmpeg, an open source software project that exemplified his expertise in communications and digital signal processing. FFmpeg is known as the “Swiss Army knife” of audio and video processing, which demonstrates its power. It contains a large number of audio and video processing and other multimedia files function library, mainly used for audio and video encoding, transcoding, video capture, format conversion, post-effect processing.

Libavcodec and libavFormat are two important components of FFmpeg. Libavcodec provides a large number of codecs for different audio and video formats. Libavformat can encapsulate and unencapsulate different media container formats. The two parts work together to efficiently convert audio and video formats. Bellard’s architecture for FFmpeg is flexible and extensible, supporting a wide range of audio and video formats. According to current data, 47 well-known companies have publicly described using FFmpeg (including Youtube, VLS and Trell), but we do know that, This is just a drop in the bucket of companies that actually use FFmpeg. Ironically, some of the most famous companies were named in FFmpeg’s Hall of Shame for not adhering to open source agreements.

In the same year that FFmpeg was released, Bellard entered and won the IOCCC competition we mentioned earlier.

Another historic moment came in 2005. That was the year Bellard launched one of the most important programs of his life, QEMU.

QEMU is a free open source simulator and virtual program that can implement hardware virtualization. It simulates a computer processor through dynamic binary translation and provides it with a different set of hardware and device models that enable the computer to run a variety of guest operating systems. It can also be used with KVM to run virtual machines at near-native speed. QEMU can also emulate user-level processes, allowing applications compiled for one architecture to run on another.

Prior to QEMU, many emulators only met the requirements of openness and versatility, but Bellard’s QEMU combines performance, reliability and versatility. The value of Bellard is not that he came up with the idea of hardware simulation, but that he can embody it in the tools that programmers and testers use commonly. Today, QEMU has become an indispensable tool for many programmers.

Is the result of love

Bellard is known to open source his major projects, which means that others can download the programs he develops for free and modify the source code. Bellard’s reason for doing this is simple: he doesn’t care about fame or money, he’s happy to develop programs that are both fun and useful. When asked why the project covers so many areas, Bellard has this to say:

“I get bored doing the same thing all the time, so EVERY now and then I switch directions.”

Bellard is willing to share his results with everyone in the world and hopes to help them.

There was an article abroad describing him as follows:

What makes Bellard unique is that he creates programs that are meaningful to others and can be used by others.

Academic careers

Bellard’s education at the Ecole Polytechnique has had the greatest impact on his academic career. With a history of 200 years, this prestigious French university has produced three Nobel Prize winners, one Fields Medal winner, three French presidents and numerous ceos of major French and international companies. The school offers a wide range of courses, with an emphasis on developing students’ critical thinking skills and providing them with rich learning resources.

During his five years here, Bellard grew rapidly. Many of the projects he developed were student assignments during his time at Ecole Polytechnique, which laid a solid foundation for his remarkable achievements in computer science.

Bellard believes that the two most important aspects of computer science are:

  • How do computers work

  • Learn different ways to use computers through the development of computer language and the study of computing itself

His interest in computational theory came from his education at Ecole Polytechnique.

To this day, he believes that aspiring computer scientists must understand computers in depth through assembly language and computer hardware.

Mathematical challenges

As mentioned earlier, Bellard was also successful in mathematics: in 2001, Bellard developed a program to print the largest known prime number at the time. On December 31, 2009, Bellard announced that he had calculated PI to 2.7 trillion decimal places in 90 days using only an ordinary home desktop computer, breaking the world record and making headlines, including an article in The French edition of Scientific American.

With all the media exposure, Bellard has been thrust into the spotlight. Curiosity has grown and he has been inundated with questions, so much so that he has created a FAQ section on his personal website devoted to answering the most frequently asked questions.

When asked why he used ordinary computers to calculate Pi, he replied as follows:

“I was not particularly interested in Pi itself, but in the various algorithms involved in performing Arbitrary precision arithmetic. Optimizing these algorithms for good performance is a difficult programming challenge.

Calculating the number of decimal places in Pi has almost no practical use, but some of the algorithms used are interesting. Besides, the whole calculation process has other implications, such as:

  • Discrete Fourier transform (DFT). It is used in a wide variety of algorithms and is found in most modern electronic devices such as digital televisions, mobile phones and music players.

  • Reliable management of large amounts of disk storage (at least for a single computer). To ensure high reliability and disk I/O bandwidth, specific methods need to be developed. This approach also works in other areas, such as video streaming or database access.

  • The entire calculation process is also a thorough test of the computer, including CPU, RAM, disk storage and cooling system. Any single error in the calculation can lead to bad results, such as poor heat dissipation and hardware failure.”

When asked if he could recommend books for learning arbitrary precision calculations, Bellard suggested the following two:

  • Modern Computer Arithmetic by Richard Brent and  Paul Zimmermann, version 0.4, November 2009.

  • The Art of Computer Programming, volume 2 :  Seminumerical Algorithms by Donald E. Knuth, Addison-Wesley, third edition, 1998.

The first can be members. “loria. Fr/PZimmermann… The second book is Gartner’s Art of Computer Programming Volume 2: Semi-Numerical Algorithms (third edition), which has been published by The Turing Community of Posts and Telecommunications Publishing House.

It’s clear that Bellard isn’t pursuing a single mathematical result when he calculates PI, but rather, as he says, he’s attacking a harder challenge — optimizing algorithms to improve computer performance.

Perhaps this is the world of genius, constantly breaking through themselves, enjoying the joy of solving problems, once solved, to find the next problem.

entrepreneurship

In 2012, Fabrice Bellard and Frank Spinelli founded Amarisoft, a software company focused on telecommunications and dedicated to providing high quality solutions for the 4G/5G community.

In the company profile, there is the following introduction:

Our world unique LTE software suite runs on standard (COTS) hardware (including PHY layer). Amarisoft technology accelerates the process of building products like eNodeB_,_ Core network or NB-IoT and vRAN based solutions.

Amarisoft’s unique core technology is the result of Fabrice Bellard’s hard work.

Bellard’s LTE base station, which Bellard spent 10 months writing at the top of the article, is the company’s product. In recent years, Bellard has focused most of its efforts on LTE soft base station systems.

low-key

If you were to ask the world’s greatest and most understated programmer, Fabrice Bellard would be one of them.

On the Internet, you can hardly find any personal interviews with Bellard or any traces of his personal life, or even photographs of him. He politely rebuffed most media reports. In the few interviews Bellard has done, he has only answered tech-related questions, such as in a French interview when asked about his personal life, Bellard said:

** Reporter: Hello Fabrice, can you introduce yourself? **

Fabrice Berra: Other than to say I’m a developer on other projects like FFmpeg and QEMU, I don’t want to talk much about that.

When repeatedly asked who he was in 2009, the year he broke the world record for PI, Bellard had a fairly simple answer:

Fabrice Bellard is one of the few programmers in the world who is as prolific and as humble as Fabrice Bellard.

Finally, here’s a picture of Fabrice Bellard’s projects over the years:

To learn more about Fabrice Bellard, visit his website: Bellard.org/

References:

En.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabric…

News.ycombinator.com/item?id=518…

Smartbear.com/blog/fabric…

www.macplus.net/depeche-823…

www.ipaidia.gr/wp-content/…

www.zhihu.com/question/28…

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QEMU

** Editor has a word to say: ** Hello, LiveVideoStack has opened a new column called “Legend of Sound and film”, this column mainly introduces you to the audio and video field has made outstanding contributions to the gods. For our first installment, we chose Fabrice Bellard, a talented French programmer who developed FFmpeg, an essential tool in the development of audio and video technology. Bellard is one of the most prolific programmers in the world, so we’ve chosen just a few representative works to write about. You’re welcome to add in the comments, and you’re also welcome to provide clues about the characters in the next issue of the legend of Sound and film.

Here, I would like to thank Teacher Liu Qi for providing information about Fabrice Bellard and Teacher Zhao Jun for reading this article. Both teachers are also the maintainers of FFmpeg community.

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