Wouter Van Oortmerssen
Founder at VoxRay Games
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top School
Top expert inModern C++ Development and Cross-Platform Computing
Wouter Van Oortmerssen is a founder and seasoned systems engineer with 13+ years building compilers, game tech, and tooling across startups and Google, now leading an indie studio focused on raytraced voxel games and user-generated adventures. He combines deep backend and systems expertise—evident from sustained contributions to WebAssembly toolchains (wabt, binaryen, emscripten) and work enabling wasm64 support—with hands-on language and compiler work on Lobster. His background spans game engines, middleware, and platform portability, including practical Windows build fixes for FlatBuffers and integration work on TreeSheets. A PhD-trained researcher with a Masters in Computational Linguistics, he blends academic rigor with pragmatic engineering and consulting for studios like Gearbox and Maxis. Colleagues know him for improving compiler robustness and diagnostics, refactoring for safer string handling, and tackling tricky memory and relocation issues. Based in San Francisco, he pairs entrepreneurial drive with low-level systems chops that surface in both open-source impact and commercial game technology.
12 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
PhD Computer Science, PhD Computer Science at University of SouthamptonMasters Computational Linguistics, Masters Computational Linguistics at University of Amsterdam
Dutch, German, Italian, English, French, Spanish
Stackoverflow
5,764reputation
276kreached
222answers
2questions
protocol-buffers
top-5%
serialization
top-5%
Github Skills (59)
debug10
javascript10
gnu-make10
c-language10
multiplatform10
scripting10
compiler-development10
testing10
windows10
llvm10
memory-management10
build-system10
cmake10
cross-platform10
c1110
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
google/flatbuffers
May 2015 - Aug 2022
FlatBuffers: Memory Efficient Serialization Library
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:9 releases, 311 reviews, 330 commits in 7 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Wouter primarily focused on addressing build and platform-specific issues within the FlatBuffers library, contributing to improved build stability on Windows. Their work involved modifying build scripts and fixing compiler errors, specifically related to Windows build files. Additionally, they improved the core functionality with Windows support.
rpcmemorypythonmarshallingprotobuf
aardappel/lobster
Jun 2013 - Jan 2023
The Lobster Programming Language
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:3 releases, 91 reviews, 1436 commits in 9 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Wouter's commits primarily involve implementing and fixing issues in the Lobster programming language. They focused on various compiler improvements, including support for new features like operator overloading, function type enhancements, and string interpolation. The user also contributed to memory management enhancements, improvements to existing built-in functions, and the development of code analysis features such as better error messages. These changes collectively improved the capabilities and robustness of the Lobster compiler.
compilerprogramming-languageinterpretermojo
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