Ask HN: If you were building a HFT system today, what language would you use?

[bbryant]

Back in 2003 I wrote my first high frequency trading system -- we used a mix of C and C#. Java was also a popular choice at that time.

Much has changed since then!

If you were building an order book or trading system today, what would be your goto language and why?

[CyberFonic]

Golang. For performance with support for coroutines and garbage collection. The other choice would be C++ since tooling has improved greatly since 2003.

[bbryant]

Thanks -- yeah, Golang GC seems very performant.

[synack]

Ada/SPARK for anything that modifies a currency value, because safety is worth a few microseconds overhead.

[wglb]

Lisp

[bbryant]

Lisp seems great for describing certain classes of trading algorithm, but what about the underlying platform?

[wglb]

Underlying platform? Since it does sockets nicely no need for more.

[bbryant]

Yeah -- I can see what you're getting at.

[CyberFonic]

Perhaps Common Lisp? But why and how?

[wglb]

Why not? It is at least as fast as Java has all the networking tools. Yes common lisp.