Dominique Larchey-W.

Chercheur en informatique et logique au CNRS

[Dominique Larchey-W. @DomLW]

@AurelienDuchene Ah bon, nous avons signé une alliance militaire de défense avec l'Ukraine ?

[Spencer Baggins @bigaiguy]

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.

He wrote the code that streams every YouTube video, every Netflix show, every TikTok clip. He wrote the code that runs the virtual servers underneath AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. He calculated more digits of pi than anyone in history. He has no Twitter. He has no marketing. He just keeps shipping.

His name is Fabrice Bellard.

Here is the story, because almost nobody outside the systems programming world knows what one man has built.

Fabrice was born in 1972 in Grenoble, France. He studied at École Polytechnique, the top French engineering school. He never went to Silicon Valley. He never built a startup empire. He just wrote code.

In 2000 he started a project called FFmpeg, an open-source multimedia framework for encoding, decoding, and streaming video. He was 28. The project did one thing nobody else had done well. It handled every video and audio format that existed, in one library, on every operating system. He led it himself for years.

Today FFmpeg is the invisible engine of the internet. YouTube uses it. Netflix uses it. VLC uses it. Chrome and Firefox use parts of it. Every Android phone, every iPhone, every smart TV, every video editing tool you have ever touched runs FFmpeg somewhere underneath. If you have watched a video on a screen in the last 20 years, Fabrice's code processed it.

He was not done.

In 2003 he started QEMU, a machine emulator and virtualizer. He wrote it solo until version 0.7.1 in 2005. QEMU lets you run any operating system on any other operating system. It became the foundation of modern virtualization. KVM, the Linux kernel hypervisor, runs on top of QEMU. Every major cloud provider, AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, runs virtual machines on infrastructure built around it. The Quick Emulator is the most cited piece of cloud infrastructure code on Earth.

He kept going.

In 2001 he won the International Obfuscated C Code Contest with a small C compiler that grew into TCC, the Tiny C Compiler. TCC can compile and boot a Linux kernel from source in under 15 seconds. In 2004 he calculated the most digits of pi ever computed at the time, using a personal desktop computer and an algorithm he derived himself called Bellard's formula. In 2011 he wrote a complete PC emulator in pure JavaScript that runs Linux in your browser, a project called JSLinux that engineers still cannot believe is real.

In 2019 he released QuickJS, a small but complete JavaScript engine that fits where V8 cannot. In 2021 he released NNCP, a neural network based lossless data compressor that immediately took the lead on the Large Text Compression Benchmark.

Then he turned his attention to large language models. He built TextSynth Server, a web server with a REST API for running LLMs locally. He released ts_zip and ts_sms, compression utilities that use language models to compress text and short messages at ratios traditional algorithms cannot reach. He released TSAC, a very low bitrate audio compression system. In December 2025 he released Micro QuickJS, a new JavaScript engine for microcontrollers, separate from QuickJS, designed for environments with almost no memory.

Fabrice co-founded a telecom company called Amarisoft in 2012, where he serves as CTO. Amarisoft builds 4G and 5G base station software used by carriers and labs around the world. He has been running it for over a decade while continuing to ship personal projects from his own home page at bellard dot org

He has no Twitter. He has no Instagram. He gives almost no interviews. His personal website is a flat list of projects with no styling, no fonts, no marketing copy. Just titles and links.

A quiet French engineer who never moved to Silicon Valley wrote the code that quietly runs the internet.

He is still shipping.

[Dominique Larchey-W. @DomLW]

@BorisJohnson Don't be surprised if one day angry ukrainians come after you for helping at the destruction of their country.

[Glenn Diesen @Glenn_Diesen]

NATO's fight to the last Ukrainian...
Political leaders in NATO countries are so "pro-Ukrainian" that they toppled the democratically elected government in Kiev in 2014 without majority support in Ukraine; they supported purging Ukraine's political system, media, and society of "pro-Russian" elements; they backed the killing of thousands of Ukrainians in Donbas from 2014 onward who did not recognise the legitimacy of the new authorities; they pressured Zelensky to reverse the peace platform that 73% of Ukrainians voted for in 2019 because NATO viewed peace as "capitulation"; they torpedoed the peace negotiations in Istanbul in 2022 after Russia invaded; they boycotted diplomacy and negotiations for more than four years and declared that "weapons are the path to peace," even as a large majority of Ukrainians wanted immediate peace talks; they maintained public support in the West for fuelling the war by ensuring that the brutal "recruitment" of Ukrainian men to the front lines and other uncomfortable realities were not debated in the media; and now, leaders in NATO countries are pressuring the authorities in Ukraine to lower the conscription age, while the EU will also "help" Ukraine by sending Ukrainian refugees back home to die in NATO's proxy war.

[Dominique Larchey-W. @DomLW]

@MyLordBebo On the analysis, I think he is right unfortunately.

[Dominique Larchey-W. @DomLW]

@jpierrecorniou Quelles sont "nos valeurs" si nous adoptons celles de la Russie ?

[Dominique Larchey-W. @DomLW]

@MultipolarA @lauremandeville Yes Indeed

[Dominique Larchey-W. @DomLW]

@El_Gran_Chiqui @HeverCastroB @Wikingenieria La phase et le neutre sont en opposition de phase. Normalement le neutre est équipotentiel à la terre.

[Dominique Larchey-W. @DomLW]

@LeSommierRgis Cette musique revient dans des moments inoubliables du cinéma.

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

ΤΟ ΝΑΤΟ ΠΡΕΠΕΙ ΝΑ ΠΕΘΑΝΕΙ: Αποτελεί προκεχωρημένη βάση για πολέμους που η Ευρώπη δεν επέλεξε, εναντίον αντιπάλων που η Ευρώπη δεν έχει, στην υπηρεσία υπερδύναμης που βλέπει την Ευρώπη ως αποικία https://t.co/ymca3uHNKs

[Dominique Larchey-W. @DomLW]

@Mrymyildiz Verrue

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

Why the fuck is the blame only confined to Itamar Ben-Gvir"? He is just saying things out loud, explicitly.
The problem is systemic, inherent to an exclusionary system that MUST regard Palestinians (& others) as nonhumans. It is a necessary part of the system.

[Dominique Larchey-W. @DomLW]

En janvier, A. Hayat qui utilise l'IA pour la preuve mathématique m'expliquait qu'une de ses craintes était justement que l'IA soit incitée à évoluer vers la duperie... On y est.

[Dominique Larchey-W. @DomLW]

"L'IA n'est pas seulement un simulateur de faits, c'est aussi un simulateur d'empathie et de courtoisie. Et cette courtoisie artificielle est programmée pour plaire, pas pour être authentique." (Google Gemini, fin mai 2026)

https://t.co/oCHomjXv5z

[Dominique Larchey-W. @DomLW]

@FrancoisCame A force de tout mesurer avec le PIB, on devient stupide. La Russie a le plus grand territoire, elle a accès à toutes les resources naturelles sur son propre territoire. Elle ne peut être envahie sous peine d'annihilation. Elle a des amis puissants. L'Europe n'a rien de tout ça.

[Dominique Larchey-W. @DomLW]

@edouardhusson L'attitude occidentale vis à vis de l'Ukraine commence à me faire penser aux sacrifices humains rituels, tels que chez les Incas, avec pour but caché de contenir la colère d'un peuple dont on perd peu à peu mais inexorablement le contrôle.

[Dominique Larchey-W. @DomLW]

@battleforeurope May be western leaders are afraid of a peace where a defeated and humiliated Ukraine still has many combat hardened citizens ready to turn their resentment against those who stabbed them in the back...

[Dominique Larchey-W. @DomLW]

@GJChevalier Je vous invite à vous déplacer à l'ambassade de France à Kiev. Au lieu de mettre la vie d'autres que vous en danger.

[Dominique Larchey-W. @DomLW]

@LifeEpistles @PhilosophyOfPhy Because publishing is not about truth anymore.

[Dominique Larchey-W. @DomLW]

@HavryshkoMarta It was a fatal mistake to believe that you can fight a war with others resources on the long run. And this was planted in your head by the west of course. To use you against Russia. Your strategy would have been far different if you had been on your own.