My jaw dropped when I read this guy wrote ffmpeg AND QEMU!!? Thats insane levels of talent and capability. I remember looking through the source for QEMU and it appeared monstrous in its scale. Dude is a legend, no wonder Carmack is complimenting him.

To be clear, while he is the original author of both those programs, both are now developed by other people and have been for many years.

Isn't that how it is supposed to work ? Stroke of genius (over and over again) to get something working given constraints of the day followed by hundreds of engineers who will improve on the foundations, basically like Wozniak ?

Yes, also to be clear, I am not diminishing Bellard's achievement