Maybe he just oneshotted it

If there were some form of "developed contributions to computing" award, his name is definitely up there. I think there could be a need for such an award - for people who reliably have created the foundations of modern computing. Otherwise it's almost always things from an academic context, which can be a little too abstract.

rare occasion where he gained a legendary status based purely on his work, I dont think I ever saw even a written interview with the guy

There is! ACM grants several awards for scientists and more.

One such award is the Turing Award [1], given "for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Award

Between ffmpeg and qemu, I always think of https://xkcd.com/2347/ when I see Fabrice's work. Especially since ffmpeg provides the backbone of almost all video streaming systems today.

Bellard it the most genius programmer to ever exist, and the least known compared to other pseudo stars.

His consistency and craftsmanship is amazing.

Being an engineer and coding at this stage/level is just remarkable- sadly this trade craft is missing in most (big?) companies as you get promoted away into oblivion.

I mean, you can do all that now, so that's not the problem. The problem would be convincing millions of people to switch, when 99.99999% of them couldn't care less.

And if you find you need more features than that - just build an app, don't make the web browser into some overly bloated app!

This would never happen because there's zero incentive to do this.

Browsers are complex because they solve a complex problem: running arbitrary applications in a secure manner across a wide range of platforms. So any "simple" browser you can come up with just won't work in the real world (yes, that means being compatible with websites that normal people use).

I can't think of an instance of the web contracting like that. Maybe when Apple decided not to support Adobe Flash.

I think there needs to be a split between the web browser as a document renderer and link follower, and the web browser as a portable target for GUI applications. But frankly my biggest gripe is that you need HTML, JS, and CSS. Three distinct languages that are extremely dissimilar in syntax and semantics that you need all three of (or some bastard cross compiler for your JSX to convert from one format to them). Just make a decent scripting language and interface for the browser and you don't need that nonsense.

I understand this has been tried before (flash, silverlight, etc). They weren't bad ideas, they were killed because of companies that were threatened by the browser as a standard target for applications.

So you want 2026 to be the year of Google AMP?

You mean like the piece of crap that was WAP?

You can already create websites to these standards. Then truncate large parts of webkit and create a new browser. Or base it on Servo.

And also bring back progressive enhancement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement

Would be cool to create a MicroBrowser, just to browser stuff that's compatible.

What about https://geminiprotocol.net/

While we're wishing, can we split CSS into two parts - styling and layout? Also, I'd like to fix the spelling on the "referer" header...

Years ago I wrote a tiny xhtml-basic browser for a job. It was great. Some of my best work. But then the iPhone came out and xhtml-basic died practically overnight.

There could be a way: This HTML-lite spec would be subset of current standard so that if you open this HTML lite page in normal browser it would still work. but HTML-lite browser would only open HTML-lite sites, apart from tech itch it could be used in someplace where not full browser is needed, especially if you are control content generation. - TV screens UI - some game engines embed chrome embed thing ( steam store page kind) - some electron apps / lighter cross platform engine - less sucky QML - i think weechat or sth has own xml bashed app froamework thing (so could be useful to people wanting to build everything app app platform - much richer markdown format ?

[delayed]

Lots of comments talking about how existing browsers can already do this, but the big benefit that current browsers can't give you is the sheer level of speed and efficiency that a highly restricted "lite web" browser could achieve, especially if the restrictions are made with efficiency in mind.

The embedded use case is obvious, but it'd also be excellent for things like documentation — with such a browser you could probably have a dozen+ doc pages open with resource usage below that of a single regular browser tab. Perfect for things that you have sitting open for long periods of time.

I think it means you can't assign to unbounded names, you must either declare with var for global, or let/const for local

I'm guessing the use of undeclared variables result in an error, instead of implicitly creating a global variable.

Down to -4. Is this generic LLM-dislike, or a reaction to perceived over-self-promotion, or something else?

No matter how much you hate LLM stuff I think it's useful to know that there's a working proof of concept of this library compiled to WASM and working as a Python library.

I didn't plan to share this on HN but then MicroQuickJS showed up on the homepage so I figured people might find it useful.

(If I hadn't disclosed I'd used Claude for this I imagine I wouldn't have had any down-votes here.)

Sort of related: About ten years ago there was a device called the Tessel by Technical Machine which you programmed with Javascript, npm, the whole nine yards. It was pretty clever - the javascript got transpiled to Lua VM bytecode and ran in the Lua VM on the device (a Cortex M3 I believe). I recently had Claude rewrite their old Node 0.8 CLI tools in Rust because I wasn't inclined to do the javascript archeology needed to get the old tools up and running. Of course then I put the Tessel back in its drawer, but fun nonetheless.

There are already libraries/frameworks that have supported this:

* espruino (https://www.espruino.com/)

* elk (https://github.com/cesanta/elk)

* DeviceScript (Microsoft Research's now defunct effort, https://github.com/microsoft/devicescript)

Yes. The key enabling feature is a lack of malloc()

Some other guy tried it as well after you, also no luck.

One strategy is to wait for US to wake up, then post, during their morning.

Other strategy is to post the same thing periodically until there is response.

He already has a JS engine which doesn’t make these restrictions

Don't forget his LZEXE from the good old DOS days which was an excellent piece of work at the time.

Don't forget his LLM based text compression software that won awards.

Guy is a genius. I hope he tries Rust someday

The first two links are broken.

He's also built a closed-source LLM inference engine, which he's been maintaining since the GPT-2 days: https://bellard.org/ts_server/ and https://textsynth.com/

For all the praise he gets here, few seem interested in his methods: writing complete programs, based on robust computer science, with minimal dependencies and tooling.

Whenever someone says there's no such thing as a 10x programmer, I point them to Fabrice and they usually change their mind.