Andreas Gal is former chief technology officer at

Mozilla Mozilla is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, publishes and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting free software and open standards. The community is supported institution ...

. He is most notable for his work on several

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

projects and Mozilla technologies. Gal was born in

Szeged Szeged ( , ; see also #Etymology, other alternative names) is List of cities and towns of Hungary#Largest cities in Hungary, the third largest city of Hungary, the largest city and regional centre of the Southern Great Plain and the county seat ...

Hungary Hungary is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning much of the Pannonian Basin, Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the south, Croatia and ...

and grew up in

Lübeck Lübeck (; or ; Latin: ), officially the Hanseatic League, Hanseatic City of Lübeck (), is a city in Northern Germany. With around 220,000 inhabitants, it is the second-largest city on the German Baltic Sea, Baltic coast and the second-larg ...

Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...

. During high school he worked on various

AX.25 network stacks and designed a routing protocol for

ham radio Amateur radio, also known as ham radio, is the use of the radio frequency spectrum for purposes of non-commercial exchange of messages, wireless experimentation, self-training, private recreation, radiosport, contesting, and emergency communi ...

network nodes (INP3) that became widely supported by AX.25 network routers. During his graduate studies at the

Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg The Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg () (Short: ''OVGU'') is a public research university founded in 1993 and is located in Magdeburg, the Capital city of Saxony-Anhalt. The university has about 13,000 students in nine Faculty (division), ...

he was a codesigner of AspectC++, an aspect-oriented extension of C and C++ languages. He later went on to obtain his

Doctor of Philosophy A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of Postgraduate education, graduate study and original resear ...

Computer Science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

at the

University of California, Irvine The University of California, Irvine (UCI or UC Irvine) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Irvine, California, United States. One of the ten campuses of the University of California system, U ...

. His thesis introduced the concept of

Tracing just-in-time compilation Tracing just-in-time compilation is a technique used by virtual machines to Optimization (computer science), optimize the execution of a program at Run time (program lifecycle phase), runtime. This is done by recording a linear sequence of freque ...

of high-level languages using trace trees. Gal joined

in 2008 and built TraceMonkey, the first JavaScript

just-in-time compiler In computing, just-in-time (JIT) compilation (also dynamic translation or run-time compilations) is compiler, compilation (of Source code, computer code) during execution of a program (at run time (program lifecycle phase), run time) rather than b ...

in a web browser, only weeks before Google announced Chrome and the V8 JavaScript engine. After his work on TraceMonkey, Gal became the Director of Research at Mozilla. A notable research project he started was

PDF.js PDF.js is a JavaScript library that renders Portable Document Format (PDF) files using the web standards-compliant HTML5 Canvas. The project is led by the Mozilla Corporation after Andreas Gal launched it (initially as an experiment) in 2011 ...

, a PDF renderer in JavaScript and HTML5, which now replaces the

Adobe Adobe (from arabic: الطوب Attub ; ) is a building material made from earth and organic materials. is Spanish for mudbrick. In some English-speaking regions of Spanish heritage, such as the Southwestern United States, the term is use ...

PDF plug-in in

Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements curr ...

. In 2011, Gal co-founded the Boot to Gecko project, which later became

Firefox OS Firefox OS (project name: ''Boot to Gecko'', also known as ''B2G'') is a discontinued Open-source software, open-source operating system made for smartphones, tablet computers, smart TVs, and Matchstick TV, dongles designed by Mozilla and exte ...

. In 2013, Gal was appointed the Vice President of Mobile Engineering of

. In April 2014, Gal became the CTO of Mozilla. In June 2015 he left Mozilla, co-founding the

Internet of Things Internet of things (IoT) describes devices with sensors, processing ability, software and other technologies that connect and exchange data with other devices and systems over the Internet or other communication networks. The IoT encompasse ...

start-up Silk Labs with two other members of the Firefox OS team (however, Silk Labs does not use Mozilla technologies). Also in 2015, Gal became an adviser at Acadine Technologies; a startup newly founded by

Li Gong Gong Li ( zh, s=巩俐, t=鞏俐; born 31 December 1965) is a Chinese-born Singaporean actress. She is regarded as one of the best actresses in China today, known for her versatility and naturalistic performances. She starred in three of the ...

(former president of Mozilla Corporation) which was to develop software based on Firefox OS. As of 2018, Gal is an employee of

Apple Inc. Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, in Silicon Valley. It is best known for its consumer electronics, software, and services. Founded in 1976 as Apple Comput ...

References

External links

Andreas Gal's Weblog
{{DEFAULTSORT:Gal, Andreas Living people Mozilla developers Mozilla people Open source people Free software programmers 1976 births Chief technology officers