Is there anything that Fabrice can't do? I mean, FFMpeg is almost a PhD thesis in and of itself, and he still manages to find time to make TinyC, QEMU, and now this. To say I'm jealous of his skills would be an understatement.
2. Does anyone have other people in their mind who is in the same league as this man? Mike Pall's LuaJIT sort of make him at this level but that is only one thing. Fabrice create things that everyone are using it one way or another, and if it wasn't HEVC patents mess we would have his bpg [1] replacing jpeg.
I know Fabrice a little. He's definitely real, smart and humble.
Visited him at his workplace about ten years ago when he worked at Netgem.
We also have a common friend we visit with spouse and kids, where we discover and discuss new gadgets (physics-based, drones, mechanical puzzles, etc). One day we played with a kind of padlock where the lock procedure implied to move a sort-of 4-direction joystick. The trick was: you could do any number of moves to lock it. It seemed like it allowed to store an arbitrary long sequence of numbers in a finite mechanical system. Fabrice arrived, heard us explain, thought, and said "the mechanics probably implements some sort of hash algorithm". That was the answer.
I've met him as well, a few times, but do not know him personally like you.
He is definitely very humble and a very good listener. When he told us about this side project he was working on about a year ago, he made it seem like it wasn't a big deal, just a small js engine, would never compete with v8. After a few questions, it was clear that the goal was to implement the latest ECMAScript spec, with all the goodies. It will never be in the v8 league, but it's on a league of its own.
Dan Bernstein. Researched curve 25519 and provided reference implementations of x25519 & ed25519. Invented chacha20, such that it never branches on user secrets to minimize side channel leakage. Along with poly1305, these form the foundation of almost all “modern crypto” from Signal to TLS v1.3. He wrote qmail as a superior MTA to the incumbent Sendmail. He’s even beat the US government in court.
And unless there's another software engineer named Daniel J. Bernstein out there, he also authored RFC 1143 documenting the Q Method of TELNET Option Negotiation [1], which prevents negotiation loops and nails down (in the shape of a state machine) exactly what behavior is good and proper for a Telnet peer.
I referenced this document a lot when writing my own Telnet stack.
That probably depends more on the listener than on the story!
I played MUDs for several years, at the same time that I was learning the ins and outs of programming. I developed some plugins for a popular third-party client called MUSHclient. The game I played also had a somewhat proprietary first-party client, and they used a spare Telnet option (one left unassigned by IANA [1]) to pass data from the server to the client to drive some extra graphical widgets on their client. I got involved in developing plugins that made use of that data, which led me to learning how to negotiate that option with the server and get the data I wanted.
I eventually started developing my own MUD client, which is where the Telnet stack came in. Now, writing a Telnet stack is just something I do when I learn a new language. It's just large enough of a project to exercise some architectural and API-level concerns.
djb also wrote daemontools, ucspi-tcp, dnscache, djbfft, kicked off the field of post-quantum cryptography (pqcrypto), wrote the spec for `redo`, and came up with `find -print0 | xargs -0`.
Richard Stallman is mostly known for his activist/politics stuff at this point, but he was also a heck of a developer. He wrote Emacs, GCC, GDB and glibc. I'm not sure if he was a total lone wolf, but my understanding is that in the early days he was overwhelmingly the main person responsible for those projects.
It's hard to get a sense of how smart RMS is, because he seems to be anti-showy about it. But I've seen him talk in different venues, and calibrate how much he says to the venue. I've also seen him ramp up how much detail he goes into, and what kinds of arguments he can make, when someone with a background in some area is challenging him on some point. I can't tell how smart he is, but I suspect that most people talking with him underestimate him.
It hard to get a sense of how Smart RMS is, because he invents his own terms or he repurposes existing well understood terms (such as the term free) to confuse the issue.
It is something I have little respect for and tbh it doesn't matter how clever it is when he spends most of that effort on for want of a better term intellectual wankery.
Possibly in his defense, I suspect it made more sense at the time. He'd just tell other hackers "this is free software - free as in...", and they'd say "OK, that's an interesting idea that resonates with what we know and see", or "OK, that's some hippie stuff, but we've been benefiting from that kind of sharing in computing, so you might have a point". They'd hear that in-person, or on the Internet, or in the text files when they went to compile and install the software. Now most people never get the introduction, or it's drowned out in all the massive noise that everyone is exposed to on the Web.
Though maybe saying "free" still works for him, because, when he's giving a talk, he can say "this is free software - free as in..." and people are there, paying attention.
Also, it's in the brand name.
A wild speculation possibility is that he's still thinking decades ahead, and maybe we go back to trying to say substantive things, and paying attention when others say substantive things, and then saying "free software" makes more sense again. (Some other instances of thinking ahead are the reason behind a subreddit name: "https://old.reddit.com/r/StallmanWasRight/")
In any case, I think it's unfortunate if people dismiss RMS's speech without listening, because of quirks and things we don't immediately understand.
I don't agree at all. From day one he been using intellectual wankery.
Regarding lists like r/stallmanwasright, I work with plenty of smart people who couldn't care less about free software some of them aren't even tech savvy and they can spot all the problems with a lot of the services we have today.
I think it is more an exercise of throwing shit at a wall until and seeing what sticks. Which btw is a perfectly valid method of seeing how your message gets across but it doesn't make you a genius.
That combined with awful manners, hygiene and the fact that he has some disgusting opinions about child abuse. I can't stand the man. The fact that this guy has any importance past "Well he was the founder of the GNU project and he wrote a text editor" seems ludicrous to me.
I think the difficulty for me in responding here is that your comment contains both assertions about intellectual merit (which could be interesting to explore), and more broad aversion to the person (which might be relevant to intellectual merit, and/or to the meta of dialogue about that, but is a manners minefield).
This thread is pretty tangential to the post to start with, so there will be better occasions to discuss these things. And maybe it helps to separate them out differently.
Guy L. Steele - no proper language design can go without him. I think he is the only person who enjoys writing language reference manuals and is able to explain every language detail mathematically and linguistically everyone can understand. He was behind C, Java, Scheme, Common Lisp, ECMA, Fortan...
Perhaps you mean behind standards and reference manuals for, rather than behind the languages? Behind Scheme and Common Lisp, okay. But he contributed to standardisation and documentation of the others after their creation, rather than being one of their designers.
Incidentally, Steele has an anecdote of perhaps an early instance of pair-programming with someone else mentioned in these HN comments, Richard Stallman (at the end of this chapter): https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch06.html
Truly. JC literally largely made gaming what it is today. I remember reading that virtually every game users code he has written, because almost every game engine uses his code in some form.
Linus has demonstrated incredible long-term effectiveness as a software developer, both creating and then shepherding two of the most important pieces of software of the last 50 years. But he seems qualitatively different than Ballard.
I'm trying to put into words what the difference feels like. Git and linux demonstrate, for Linus, great intelligence but not genius, the way Ballard's works do. And on Linus' side, git and linux demonstrate leadership, pragmatism, and a tremendous understanding of how to actually drive a large project forward over time, which Ballard's works don't.
Torvalds is like Brahms, who published relatively few works, but polished, refined, and winnowed them until they were of very high quality. He wrote his duds, but he knew enough not to publish them. Ballard is like Bach: an unbroken series of gems, mostly small- to medium-sized, each one an immaculate work of craftsmanship wedded to incandescent genius. Nothing in the entire hoard is inferior work --- there's nothing you can point to and say, "Bach screwed up here."
Can't speak to 1, but I kind of feel like TJ Holowaychuk in the Node.js community started getting close to Fabrice's level (until he left Node). Express, Stylus, Koa, Formidable, etc...
TJ has created a large number of popular software packages, but I don't consider the depth of the software to be close in complexity of the type of software that Fabrice is capable of - basically anything he puts his mind to.
bellard.org - has the most impressive portfolio of software created from a single developer I've ever seen. It's more astonishing how varied each of his accomplishments are - covering some of the hardest programs in different computer science fields.
He's by far the best programmer in my book, I'm not sure who I'd put at #2, there's a number of contenders, but anyone else I can think of are experts in their respective fields, I don't know of anyone who has compiled such a broad list of complex software covering that many different fields.
Yeah, it's the breadth that gets me. There are several very impressive expert programmers in their area, but Fabrice seems to be able to step into any subfield he finds interesting, work on it for a couple years, then leave something behind that others are willing to spend years of their lives maintaining and extending. I could see QuickJS quietly running on a Mars rover 10 years from now. Not because JS. Because Fabrice. Always bet on Bellard.
No doubt a brilliant academic and mathematical mind with invaluable contributions to field of comp-sci and algorithms and author of the iconic TAOCP, but in terms of software works he's single-handedly produced? He's most famous for TeX typesetting system and inventing Literate programming, but his other software have had a lot less impact.
But that's mostly by choice as he's predominantly a professor who spends most of his time teaching so he's obviously going to have created a lot less body of digital works than a full-time developer is going to have.
That's probably true; FFMpeg almost single-handedly created an entire cottage industry in video production. The amount of elaborate image-processing it allows you to do probably does overtake most PhD papers you're likely to read.
One thing to note... he doesn't bother himself with pretty websites, community building of any kind, splash pages... It's just plain html. Not even github as far as I could tell. He just works on the tech and puts it out there with benchmarks as proof of his claims.
His humility (and general lack of "marketing wank" on his site) is certainly another aspect I admire. There's far too much "look at my absolutely amazing $trivial_app with best-in-class X and high-quality Y and gorgeous Z and ..." out there, that just seeing the equivalent of "This is a JS engine I wrote." and a simple enumeration of features without all that embellishment feels very refreshing.
Yes that's true in general, but ... I hate to be the party pooper here, but ....
What makes this JS implementation deserve the name "Quick"?
I noticed it doesn't appear to do JIT compilation or any of the fancy optimisations V8 does. So whilst it may start up quickly, and may interpret quickly, it won't actually execute JS quickly relative to V8, unless I missed something huge in the linked web page.
I got the sense there are several performance claims here that sound impressive but won't actually matter for nearly every JavaScript user.
It seems to be relatively very fast in the space of small javascript interpreters meant for embedding. That's a different niche with different constraints.
But "embedding" is a very vague term. You can embed V8 too. It's just a C++ library, it can be linked into other programs. It can run on relatively small devices. If you're going to say, but what about even smaller devices than that then sure, maybe this implementation can squeeze into a certain class of rare device that can't run V8. But then why would such a constrained device be running JavaScript at all. That would seem to be the issue there!
You certainly can embed V8, but it's a more involved affair. It's not the use case that's prioritized.
It's not at all my field of expertise, but my guess is that problems with V8 are that it's an order of magnitude larger, that it's written in C++ rather than C89, that it's more likely to make large changes to the way it works, and that it uses more memory.
All of those are good decisions to make for a component of Chrome that helps run webpages. But sometimes you'll only want to make it possible for users of your less than massive technical application to script its behavior using a language they might already be familiar with, and then those properties are undesirable.
"Quick" calls to mind something that's not just fast, but nimble.
Wow... I didn't pay attention to the URL and when I open this site I thought 'Who does an insane project like writing a new JS/ES interpreter all by himself (in C). Almost as insane as the guy who wrote that x86 emulator for the browser...'.
Just to learn that it is indeed the same guy (plus Charlie Gordon) :D
Before that, there even was a third party demo of QEMU running in the browser using PNaCl. Right after PNaCl died, jslinux popped up to continue the legacy, but with even more awesomeness.
