[lordnacho]

Depends on what "fundamental" means. If we're talking about how stuff is scheduled, then yes of course you're right. Either we suspend stuff and take a hit on when to continue, or we hot-loop and latency is minimized at the cost of cooking a CPU.

But there's a bunch of stuff that isn't that part of the trading system, though. All the code that deals with the format of the incoming exchange might still be useful somehow. All the internal messages as well might just have the same format. The logic of putting events on some sort of queue for some other worker (task/thread) to do seems pretty similar to me. You are just handling the messages immediately rather than waking up a thread for it, and that seems to be the tradeoff.

[_3u10]

These libs are more about hot paths / cache coherency and allowing single CPU processing (no cache coherency issues / lock contention) than anything else. That is where the performance comes from, referred to as "mechanical sympathy" in the original LMAX paper.

Originally computers were expensive, and lots of users wanted to share a system, so a lot of OS thought went into this, LMAX flips the script on this, computers are cheap, and you want the computer doing one thing as fast as possible, which isn't a good fit for modern OS's that have been designed around the exact opposite idea. This is also why bare metal is many times faster than VMs in practice, because you aren't sharing someone else's computer with a bunch of other programs polluting the cache.

[lordnacho]

Yeah, I agree. But the ideas of mechanical sympathy carry over into more than one kind of design. You can still be thinking about caches and branch prediction while writing things in async. It's just the awareness of it that allows you to make the tradeoffs you care about.

[Quekid5]

Eh... not really. The main problem is that it becomes incredibly hard to reason about the exact sequencing of things (which matters a lot for mechanical sympathy) in async world.