A natural question I've pondered from time to time is whether Fabrice Bellard is really a time traveler from a more advanced civilization in the future, sent back in time to show us, mere mortals, what humankind will be capable of in the future.

If this sounds far-fetched, consider that he has created FFMPEG, QEMU, LibBF, SoftFP, BPG, TinyEMU, a software implementation of 4G/LTE, a PC emulator in Javascript, the TCC compiler, TinyGL, LZEXE, and a tiny program for computing the biggest known prime number.

And that's just a partial list of his successful projects, which now of course also include software for more efficient lossless compression with deep LSTM and Transformer neural networks.

Any of these projects, on its own, would be considered a notable achievement for an ordinary human being.

Fabrice Bellard deserves some kind of superhuman lifetime achievement award.

Source: https://bellard.org