Friend who is not a software person sent me this tweet, which amused me as it did them. They asked if “runk” was real, which I assume not.

But what are some good examples of real ones like this? xz became famous for the hack of course, so i then read a bit about how important this compression algorithm is/was.

  • dosse91
    144·
    5 months ago

    I’d say ffmpeg is a good example, it’s used by almost every piece of software that has to manipulate audio or video (including messaging applications), yet not many people know about its existance.

    • Fred@programming.devEnglish
      70·
      5 months ago

      And Fabrice Bellard, the original author of ffmpeg, went on to create qemu which pretty much made open-source virtualization possible. Also TCC (even if I don’t think that one is widely used), he established a world record for computing decimals of Pi using a single machine that had ~2000× less FLOPS than the previous record, and so much more…

      • cartoon meme dog@lemm.ee
        29·
        5 months ago

        Fabric Bellard’s body of work is fairly strong evidence for time travel having happened already.

        Or just genius.