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- Hacker News
- I think it is a pity they’ll likely never open source any of this stuff
Of course, financial institutions have a lot of “secret sauce” - such as financial models - you’d never expect them to release.
But this kind of underlying infrastructure isn’t really “secret sauce”
by skissane - If you ever worked with mainframe, you'll see a lot of similarities:
- Unified interface for object stores
- Source code stored with data files
- Job runner
I also see some similarities with Lisp machine, the fact Python also has a REPL, and able to dump/restore image state (but in this case discrete objects are serialized, not the entire memory).
This might sound crazy for people used to having 90% glue code / 10% business codebases, but to me seems like a very efficient way to have users directly drive what is effectively a large computer, and more like how things used to be.
The drawback is that it seems to be a monolith, and maybe hard to reimplement on top of more modern foundations. But as a general API, it seems to make sense.
by manoDev - >Applications also commonly store their internal state in Barbara - writing dataclasses straight in and out with only very simple locking and transactions (if any).
Right out of the gates, it's crazy how this contrasts with Mercury's Haskell infra
by TZubiri - I remember reading this article when it was first posted here five years ago, and I've been fascinated by Bank Python since. It actually reminds me of a number of systems I've come up with in my head but never told anyone about or wrote down in any way.by amyjess
- What a well-written account of "how things are done".
> Time to drop a bit of a bombshell: the [Barbara] source code is in Barbara too, not on disk. Remain composed. It's kept in a special Barbara ring called sourcecode.
by axus - When first encountering these ecosystems and looking at the various pieces they contain, one may repeatedly ask: "why didn't they just use <off-the-shelf solution> for this problem instead of writing this component/subsystem from scratch"?
The answer is often that the battle-hardened mature off-the-shelf solution did not exist at the time the code was written. You're doing software archaeology.
by tsukikage - To the best of my knowledge much of this originated with SecDB/Slang at Goldman - SecDB (securities db I believe) being the object store and slang the somewhat quirky C like language that ran with it (also the only language I’ve used professionally that let you have spaces in the variable names).
Some of the folk that built that (or worked on it) ended up at JPM and Merrill where they built the Python centric version - Alpha and Quartz respectively. Barclays Capital has/had a similar system as well I think, but it’s not one I know about offhand - they did though, memorably, have a system that was pretty much Haskell-in-Excel.
by elemeno - I've worked at a bank and several large hedge funds.
Some additional interesting tech stories I would add:
- in 2010, the bank had retail Good Till Cancel orders from 1997. I think one was "Buy INTC at $6"
- There is a mix of "I didn't know technology could do this" in the good sense and "I'm amazed this code a. works at all and b. hasn't had an outage in 6 years"
- There is a strong desire, I chose this word carefully, to migrate off of legacy systems. That being said there are several; big issues: 1. it's a GIGANTIC amount of effort with often unclear ROI to the business, 2. upside is capped (maybe you get a promotion) but downside risk is huge (you could tank the business with an outage). 3. Slow, gradual refactors are generally better here but some things can only be "big bang" for various reasons
- You tend to see old but performant and battle tested systems get retired in favor of shiny, new systems with lots of bugs. Why? It looks better on a resume to say "I retired old, crufty legacy system and rolled out a new system" instead of "I refactored old system to be better"
- The complexities are wild e.g. Korean trading requires: a. traders to be licensed in Korea (even if they are working in NYC), b. servers to be in Korea c. tagging orders with not only their executions but also the exchange rate at the time
- There are entire SYSTEMS built to track trade breaks (e.g. Bank A doesn't agreed with Bank B on fill 1248383). Some of these trade breaks are open for for YEARS due to litigation, companies going out of business etc
I could go on and on about this.
If anyone is ever interested in having me on a podcast to talk more about it, I would totally be up for it.
by alexpotato