from Hacker News

Ask HN: My software has moved trillions of dollars. AMA

by logotype on 3/23/25, 10:16 PM with 27 comments

It's a software library that facilitates trades between counterparties, a.k.a. the Financial Information eXchange protocol. My journey from building a hardware accelerated HFT system to pivoting to high-level Typescript. Ask me anything if you're curious.

  • by logotype on 3/23/25, 10:41 PM

    Before it all started, back in the early 2010s, I read about High Frequency Trading, and it sounded super interesting. I wanted to understand how it worked. Without knowing anything about it, I thought I could simply get a Xilinx dev board and start using Verilog to build a hardware appliance for fast trades. Little did I know that a cheap dev board with limited logic gates wasn’t even enough to fit an Ethernet IP, let alone the challenges of using Verilog. I soon realized that it's probably more suited for electrical engineers (EEs) than software engineers (SWEs).

  • by GianFabien on 3/24/25, 1:30 AM

    I have written a lot of C code running on Unix supercomputers for fund managers.

    Based on my perhaps limited experience, I would have never thought that any VM based language would be accepted for production use. Could you explain how and where your software is being used in the banking world.

  • by proc0 on 3/23/25, 11:07 PM

    I wasn't expecting TS and HFT in the same sentence. Are you pivoting to something else with TS? Surely it's not for HFT?

  • by pavel_lishin on 3/23/25, 10:33 PM

    ... can you say more than the absolute bare minimum you have so far? It's impossible to come up with any decent questions without knowing anything.

    edit: wait, is this it? https://fixparser.dev/what-is-fix

  • by sans_souse on 3/23/25, 10:29 PM

    Can I have some?