Lightweight, glass fibre-reinforced composites have gained a broad, global acceptance in commercial markets with a total of more than US$ 7bn in revenue since its first commercial production in the USA in the mid-1930s. This article briefly reviews recent development of continuous glass fibres with a focus on high-performance glass fibres. With accelerated commercial demands on high performance glasses and/or glass fibres, there is a growing realisation of fundamental needs in decoding the nature of glass structures, or "genes" of glass structure building blocks and establishing their relationships to properties of glasses or glass fibres. The related database development can enable researchers shortening the number of product development cycles to bring new fibre products to the market. A special sections, therefore, provided illustrating recent progress in characterisations of glass structures by using techniques of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, Raman spectroscopy, and molecular dynamics simulations.
