@idi527 I agree with you !!
KishoreKarunakaran
felix-d
The beam is a top choice for trading platforms. The author of Learn You Some Erlang For Great Good, Fred Hébert, was building an ad auction system while working on his book I believe.
3
jorinvo
Although it doesn’t seem like you really need it here, there is an interesting talk about building hard real time systems on top of the Erlang VM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjmZoAtkkLY
Even if you don’t need hard real time, the talk gives some nice insight into using NIFs and dedicated hardware to build high performance systems.
2
dimitarvp
Wish I could see the code of that.
As a related thought, maybe we as a community should add another category in the Awesome Elixir (curated Elixir libraries list) that has pointers to libraries that allow you to have an Erlang-compliant node written in other languages.
I heard about C++, Rust and Go libraries but that’s about it. There are probably more?
3
seamon
hmm…yes, we think it’s a good choice for trading system. we wrote https://chaince.com as mentioned above by @gonglexin (and thank you so much 
) based on pure elixir/phoenix/OTP infrastructure.
we’re using phoenix channel with websocket as order submission and trading reports system, it’s very fast. we think it can be called “real time”.
as to the High Availability, it’s just the pros of OTP. there’re 12 nodes in our cluster, and the whole cluster can be rolling restarted any time we like, without any service interruption.
“elixir is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever DIES” 
4
aseigo
Java … as much as I dislike that language, that can be a real deal-maker for large enterprise-y shops that are heavily vested in the Java ecosystem.
That said, you don’t really need a full node to just supervise external processes or do simple communication with them (stdout/stdin style). A port is enough, as it lets you launch, sent/recv data and get notified of termination. This really opens the door to executables written in all sorts of languages.
0
mmport80
Goldman uses Erlang.
There was a big scandal a few years ago about one of their Erlang programmers.
3
rupurt
@KishoreKarunakaran I’ve been working on just that 
and get sub ms latencies with colocated servers. I’ve open sourced the plumbing for the framework here GitHub - fremantle-industries/tai: A composable, real time, market data and trade execution toolkit. Built with Elixir, runs on the Erlang virtual machine · GitHub but it’s still very much in the alpha stages. I’m posting it with a huge disclaimer that this is the project I used to learn Elixir, so there’s bunches of code that needs improvements 
Currently it only does cryptocurrencies but I’ve been playing around with adding an adapter for stock trading through https://alpaca.markets/
1
lpil
Creator of Gleam
Friends who work in high frequency trading tell me that in the hot path where latency is critical that languages with non-deterministic garbage collection such as Elixir are not suitable as the latency is not low enough it consistent enough.
Outside of the hot path Java and Python are used, so I suspect latency is less important there.
I suspect Elixir hits an awkward middle ground where it is too slow for the fast bits and too niche for the rest (given the extreme hiring requirements of these companies).
1
dimitarvp
You are partially correct. I’ve been consulting for 2 such companies in the past. They get some really beefy servers, I must tell you (of the 96-core & 1TB ECC RAM kind). There even the not-so-amazing Java GC acts quite well.
It’s all about fine-tuning. They had a 25-line script to start their Java VMs and all memory allocation and GC parameters were fine-tuned to hell and back for minimum latency.
I am not an expert in the BEAM but if a mediocre GC tech like Java’s can be used in high-freq trading in this manner then I see no reason why you can’t use Erlang/Elixir or Go. Last time I checked the BEAM VM has plenty of startup parameters that can significantly change its GC and memory allocation behaviour.
0