When I first read the source for his original QuickJS implementation I was amazed to discover he created the entirety of JavaScript in a single xxx thousand line C file (more or less).

That was a sort of defining moment in my personal coding; a lot of my websites and apps are now single file source wherever possible/practical.

This is like Feynman's method for solving hard scientific problems: write down the question, think very hard, write down the answer.

It doesn't necessarily translate to people who are less brilliant.

I agree: he loves to "roll your own" a lot. Re: minimal dependencies - the codebase has a software FP implementation including printing and parsing, and some home-rolled math routines for trigonometric and other transcendental functions.

Honestly, it's a reminder that, for the time it takes, it's incredibly fun to build from scratch and understand through-and-through your own system.

Although you have to take detours from, say, writing a bytecode VM, to writing FP printing and parsing routines...

Because he choose the hardest path. Difficult problems, no shortcuts, ambitious, taking time to complete. Our environment in general is the opposite of that.

> few seem interested in his methods:

You are absolutely wrong here. Most of us wish that somebody would get him to sit for an in-depth interview and/or get him to write a book on his thinking, problem-solving approach, advice etc. i.e. "we want to pick his brain".

But he is not interested and seems to live on a different plane :-(

I used to play around with Textsynth, but not being OSS killed the appeal for me once llama.cpp came around.

I remember LZEXE from those olden days. When I discovered the author of FFmpeg and QEMU also created LZEXE, I was so impressed. I've been using his software for my entire computing career.

It's similar to the respect I have for the work of Anders Hejlsberg, who created Turbo Pascal, with which I learned to program; and also C# and TypeScript.

Self-decompressing executables felt like magic to me at the time. Fantastic work, overall.

Fabrice, if you're reading this, please consider replacing Rust instead with your own memory safe language.

The design intent of Rust is a powerful idea, and Rust is the best of its class, but the language itself is under-specified[1] which prevents basic, provably-correct optimizations[0]. At a technical level, Rust could be amended to address these problems, but at a social level, there are now too many people who can block the change, and there's a growing body of backwards compatibility to preserve. This leads reasonable people to give up on Rust and use something else[0], which compounds situations like [2] where projects that need it drop it because it's hard to find people to work on it.

Having written low-level high-performance programs, Fabrice Bellard has the experience to write a memory safe language that allows hardware control. And he has the faculties to assess design changes without tying them up in committee. I covet his attentions in this space.

[0]: https://databento.com/blog/why-we-didnt-rewrite-our-feed-han...

[1]: https://blog.polybdenum.com/2024/06/07/the-inconceivable-typ...

[2]: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/12/21/dropping-hyper/

peak hacker news comment lol

Perhaps closer to 100x actually.

I was going to mention the last one, and his ASN.1 compiler which is likely related to his telco work:

https://bellard.org/ffasn1/

The ffmpeg link was changed apparently, but the QEmu link still works he just redirects to the QEmu homepage.