tomaz bracic

[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.

[tomaz bracic @tomazbracic]

@PostureUni Pain

[tomaz bracic @tomazbracic]

@hugobarauna Hi, about the book... I was really happy about this book, still am. But since that date to now there were no updates? :( Any plans to do that?

[ヒロクライム🤣🤣🤣 @tannokasa3]

微笑ましいですね😇

[Ray🫧 @ravikiran_dev7]

No disrespect to Linus Torvalds, but this guy is the greatest geek alive 🫡

Created UNIX in 1971 when he was 28 years old.

Created Go in 2009 when he was 66 years old😲

He also developed the B programming language (which led to C), created UTF-8 encoding (making international text possible online), and designed essential tools like grep that developers still rely on daily.

He also helped with the development of Multics (that led to UNIX), Plan 9 from Bell Labs and Inferno operating systems.

That's 4 operating systems in total... Most people don't even use these many OS.

Pretty impressive resume, right? 🔥

And it's a shame that many people, even the ones in the IT and tech industry, don't know him.

Ken Thompson.... Remember the name 🙏

[André Motta @investvix]

Mais uma sensacional que apareceu por aqui.
Dá para parar de assistir não.

[santifer @santifer]

Built this to find my own job. Open sourced it. 12K+ stars in two days.

Free: https://t.co/TPni1Pfd1l

[Jason Ai. Williams @GoingParabolic]

This may be the most majestic thing I’ve ever seen.

[Epic Clip Vault @EpicClipVault]

Asking an audience member to come up and tell a joke, and he nailed it 🤣

[redpillbot @redpillb0t]

Epstein Victim: “I was raped three times a day and I wasn’t the only girl. It was a conveyor belt of abuse.”

[Jackson Hinkle 🇺🇸 @jacksonhinkle]

💔🇮🇷 Heartbreaking photos show an Iranian mother bidding farewell to her child martyred in a US-Israeli strike

[Save Gaza @Alee93ale]

This is Israel, world

Israeli soldiers continue to boast about destroying what remains of Gaza, despite claims of a ceasefire. The genocide continues.

Repost this. Please I beg you

[Lozzy B 🇦🇺𝕏 @TruthFairy131]

The Nazi’s look like Angels compared to Modern day Israel 🇮🇱

[Parwiz Hamidi _🇵🇸 @Palestine001_]

I published this photo because I want to know how much this man is loved by people around the world.

[Jvnior @Jvnior]

🚨🇺🇸 Former FBI Counter Terrorism Consultant Pau Williams says: “We created ISIS. It’s a CIA creation"

[InfoGram @_InfoGram_]

🚨BREAKING: This is VERY BRUTAL 🔥

🇺🇸Professor John: "From 1971 to 2022, America killed 38 million people. They are the origin of terrøŕiśm."

“And this is the very same U.S. that now wants to ‘liberate’ Iran.”

BRUTAL REALITY CHECK 🔥🗿

[GCO @GCO_Global]

🚨 Military rebellion against Trump
20 US generals refuse Trump's orders and submit their resignations!!

America is collapsing

[The Muslim Cowboy @MercifulMessage]

Repost if you have a spine

[LynneP @LynneBP_294]

My kind of house! 😎🌷
A family in Norway built an entire 2 story house inside a greenhouse. What an amazing idea!

[Bill Madden @maddenifico]

A young American soldier in Vietnam has some advice for the mothers and fathers who are sending their children to fight in the pedophile psychopth's war of choice in Iran. 😳👇