Électro libre

[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.

[Caisses de grève (Gauche Gaza / Antifasciste) @caissesdegreve]

"Le programme de gauche, il est financé, soutenu par des économistes très sérieux, et il dérange les milieux financiers, parce qu'il entraîne un changement de la répartition des richesses."
@PorcherThomas

[Julien Pain @JulienPain]

Je vois tourner l’article du Wall street journal sur l’origine du Covid. Censé prouver que le virus a été créé en laboratoire. Je pense que la plupart le font circuler en n’ayant lu que le titre, donc je vais vous le résumer…

[Terrible Maps @TerribleMaps]

A comprehensive map of all countries that use the MMDDYYYY date format

[Yann LeCun @ylecun]

Right.

[Gilles Raveaud @RaveaudGilles]

"Le montant net de la pension d’un député au bout de 5 ans de mandat s’établit, depuis cette réforme, à 684 euros". Deux mandats suffisent pour avoir l'équivalent de la retraite moyenne en France, pour 40 ans de travail. Suite... 1/2

[Defakator 🧆 @DEFAKATOR_Off]

Pour repérer les appels de démarchage commercial : désormais en métropole ils doivent utiliser un numéro commençant par
0162, 0163
0270, 0271
0377, 0378
0424, 0425
0568, 0569
0948, 0949
et n'ont plus le droit aux 06, 07, 08.
Infos sur le site de l'ARCEP ➡️https://t.co/ACjhJ1d8v0

[Creapills 💊 @creapills]

Parfait pour suivre (discrètement) la Coupe du Monde au bureau

[Mgr Michel Aupetit @MichelAupetit]

Pourquoi de si nombreuses personnes aiment fouiller dans les poubelles ? Pour se rassasier des mauvaises odeurs ou pour masquer leurs propres ordures ? Je me sens de plus en plus attiré vers le Ciel pour me délecter de la bonne odeur du Christ

[Jo' 🇪🇺 🇺🇦 #NAFO @jofromnafo]

I often hear Americans & rich brits justify buying oversized, polluting vehicles by claiming they need them because they live in the "countryside".

I call bullshit, Ladies and Gentlemen, allow me to introduce, the Citroen C15⬇

[Defend Intelligence (Anis Ayari) @DFintelligence]

Vous avez du voir passer cette histoire d'ECOLE D'INFLUENCEURS.

Et bien j'ai enquêté pendant plusieurs heures sur l'école. Voici ce que j'ai découvert, c'est pas très propre ⬇️

[Defend Intelligence (Anis Ayari) @DFintelligence]

Et voilà. Je l’ai dis depuis le premier jour qu’il rachètera JAMAIS Twitter !

Tout les “analystes tech” qui se sont excité sur la News sans aucun esprit critique me font doucement rire.

Alalala…. Saperlipopette.

[Les Joies du Code @lesjoiesducode]

Personne :

Les développeurs JavaScript toutes les 5 minutes :

[Gilles Raveaud @RaveaudGilles]

Bonsoir, est-ce que des personnes, jeunes, salariés, qui s'apprêtent à voter Le Pen voudraient bien m'expliquer ce qu'elles espèrent, concrètement, pour elles-mêmes, de ce vote ? Mes MP sont ouverts.

[Ｓｉℓvè𝐫ε ᵐ𝑒ʳ𝐂i𝒆r @Silvae]

Aujourd'hui je vais vous expliquer comment avoir accès parfaitement légalement à un kiosque de plusieurs centaines de journaux et de magazines (dans le Monde, le Figaro) pour une somme RIDICULE par mois. => Thread

[ThinkerView @Thinker_View]

Rigolez pas c'est payé avec notre blé

[ZeratoR @ZeratoR]

Les notifs discord qui marchent plus en push sur téléphone depuis 3 jours, je suffoque, l'air est irrespirable

[Locklear @Lockl34r]

Cher Viewers,

JEU CONCOURS !!

À l’occasion de la sortie du premier écran ROG Swift 360hz Full HD @ASUS_ROG_FR et moi-même vous donnons la possibilité d’en gagner un !

Pour participer :
✅Follow @ASUS_ROG_FR & @Lockl34r
🔁RT

TAS : 02/04

#Ad