Comment by mtlynch

Comment by mtlynch 19 hours ago

5 replies

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People talk about how productive Fabrice Bellard is, but I don't think anyone appreciates just how productive he is.

Here's the commit history for this project

b700a4d (2025-12-22T1420) - Creates an empty project with an MIT license

295a36b (2025-12-22T1432) - Implements the JavaScript engine, the C API, the REPL, and all documentation

He went from zero to a complete JS implementation in just 12 minutes!

I couldn't do that even if you gave me twice as much time.

Okay, but seriously, this is super cool, and I continue to be amazed by Fabrice. I honestly do think it would be interesting to do an analysis of a day or week of Fabrice's commits to see if there's something about his approach that others can apply besides just being a hardworking genius.

ronsor 18 hours ago

It's funny how many people replying here just got whooshed. This comment is satire; they don't actually think Bellard wrote everything in 12 minutes.

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andoando 19 hours ago

Doesn't say much. Probably had it largely written down and put it together. I don't think it'd even be humanely possible to do that in 12 minutes.

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tremon 19 hours ago

That doesn't mean anything. I quite often start with writing a proof-of-concept, and only initialize the git repository when I'm confident the POC will actually lead to something useful. Common sense says that those files already existed at the time of the first commit.

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