> A French engineer who lives quietly in Paris has spent 30 years writing software that the entire internet now runs on without knowing his name.

... do tech people really not know who Fabrice Bellard is?

He's kind of a household name in a lot of programming circles

I'll be honest. I discovered him with this post. And I studied in France. I am also familiar with his projects, the obfuscated C code contest and more. Just don't remember seeing his name.

I guess that if people aren't loud on social media, people tend to ignore them.

Respect to those who posted their praise of someone else on social media. We need more of this.

I think I've known about him for 20 years right now, ever since I discovered his code to compute pi to an ungodly amount of digits. The man sure was prolific.

I've been around for a long time and I know of him. Most people don't bother looking up where stuff comes from.

He's a lifelong familiar name since the LZEXE days.

no, most people wouldn't know. you're in an echo chamber if you think he is well known.

I have an explicit rule not to meet or look up my heroes. Been burned way too many times.

I don't need to know who is building VLC, curl, ffmpeg or any of the other essentials in my life. I just appreciate their work and pitch in some money if possible.

First time hearing the name too.

>programming circles

Well, not all tech people are part of some curcles I guess.

And you can just email him. He's just this guy, that writes stuff, and likes to help answer questions about it.

The HN bubble surfaces mainly those programmers who are either

- active in the startup/VC scene

- "indie hackers"

- chasing platonic elegance with functional languages (for which the world at large doesn't care)

- rewriting everything in Rust

Fabrice doesn't seems to firmly fit any of this.

"Tech people" aren't one single homogeneous mass. His name is unlikely to show up in the same conversation as, say, DHH.