Jean-loup Gailly (born 1956) is a French

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...

and an author of

gzip gzip is a file format and a software application used for file compression and decompression. The program was created by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler as a free software replacement for the compress program used in early Unix systems, and in ...

. He wrote the compression code of the portable archiver of the

Info-ZIP Info-ZIP is a set of open-source software to handle ZIP (file format), ZIP archives. It has been in circulation since 1989. It consists of 4 separately-installable packages: the Zip and UnZip command-line utilities; and WiZ and MacZip, whic ...

and the tools compatible with the

PKZIP PKZIP is a file archiving computer program, notable for introducing the popular ZIP file format. PKZIP was first introduced for MS-DOS on the IBM-PC compatible platform in 1989. Since then versions have been released for a number of other ...

archiver for

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few ope ...

. He worked over

zlib zlib ( or "zeta-lib", ) is a software library used for data compression. zlib was written by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler and is an abstraction of the DEFLATE compression algorithm used in their gzip file compression program. zlib is also ...

in collaboration with

Mark Adler Mark Adler (born 1959) is an American software engineer. He is best known for his work in the field of data compression as the author of the Adler-32 checksum function, and a co-author together with Jean-loup Gailly of the zlib compression librar ...

. He prefers to write his hyphenated first name with only the J but not the L capitalized. He wrote a chapter on fractal image compression for Mark Nelson's The Data Compression Book. From 1990 to 1995, while working for Chorus Systèmes SA, he designed the real-time executive of the

ChorusOS ChorusOS is a microkernel real-time operating system designed as a message passing computing model. ChorusOS began as the Chorus distributed real-time operating system research project at the French Institute for Research in Computer Science an ...

microkernel In computer science, a microkernel (often abbreviated as μ-kernel) is the near-minimum amount of software that can provide the mechanisms needed to implement an operating system (OS). These mechanisms include low-level address space management, ...

. From 1999 to 2001, he was the CTO of

Mandrakesoft Mandriva S.A. was a public software company specializing in Linux and open-source software. Its corporate headquarters was in Paris, and it had development centers in Metz, France and Curitiba, Brazil. Mandriva, S.A. was the developer and maint ...

. From 2006 to 2014, he worked at

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

as a Tech. Lead Manager.

References

External links

Jean-loup's home page

Jean-loup Gailly on gzip, Go and Mandrake
an interview on

Slashdot ''Slashdot'' (sometimes abbreviated as ''/.'') is a social news website that originally advertised itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters". It features news stories concerning science, technology, and politics that are submitted and evalu ...

Living people Computer programmers GNU people Google employees 1956 births {{programmer-stub