Samuel Thibault is a seasoned professor and systems engineer based in Bordeaux with 26 years of experience at the intersection of research and low-level system software. He combines academic leadership at Université de Bordeaux and Inria with long-standing practical contributions to core open-source projects—most notably GCC, glibc, util-linux and networking daemons like ppp and xl2tpd. His work emphasizes portability, reliability and accessibility, from adding Hurd support and execveat to fixing memory bugs in speech synthesis and braille translation libraries. Samuel’s profile reflects deep expertise in OS internals, threading, unwinding and network protocol implementation, often addressing subtle platform-specific corner cases. Beyond code, he has a strong teaching and research background in multicore and computer architecture, bridging theory and production-quality systems. A less obvious thread in his career is consistent focus on making mainstream tools run on niche platforms (GNU/Hurd), highlighting a dedication to software inclusivity and portability.
26 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) at École normale supérieure de Lyon
eSpeak NG is an open source speech synthesizer that supports more than hundred languages and accents.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:16 reviews, 135 commits, 177 PRs in 2 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Samuel primarily focused on improving the performance and stability of the eSpeak NG speech synthesizer. Their contributions include fixing out-of-bounds memory access errors detected by Valgrind, which addressed potential crashes. They also implemented a fix for audio card issues, enabling the application to retry audio initialization. Further improvements involved code refactoring and preventing potential deadlocks by avoiding the use of `pthread_cancel`.
Paul's PPP Package: PPP daemon and associated utilities | Official GitHub repo: https://github.com/ppp-project/ppp
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & System Architect
Contributions:9 reviews, 16 commits, 23 PRs in 1 year 2 months
Contributions summary:Samuel primarily contributes to the core functionalities of the PPP daemon and related utilities, enhancing IPv6 support and implementing features related to default routing. They added options to control the default route behavior and to strip MS domain names. Moreover, the user made improvements to the build process, fixed bugs, and refactored code to improve overall system performance. These actions reflect a strong understanding of system architecture and networking protocols.
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Samuel Thibault - Professor at Université de Bordeaux