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Comment by galangalalgol | Hacker News Reader

Do people actually use c++ for HFT? I thought it was all verilog and cuda.

Yeah and low-frequency too. Pick up metatrader sometime it's an interesting practical application of C++ skills if you're into that kind of thing [1]

[1] https://www.metaquotes.net/en/metatrader5/algorithmic-tradin...

The glue code is C++ still. It's also a much less glamorous job than when the C++ programmers were the "hot shit" instead of the people who specialized in accelerators.

So they are complaining that they can't find people who want to be second class citizens while still dealing with the pressure and hours using language skills they acknowledge are in high demand...

CUDA applications are usually written in C++. Also, I think HFT normally works with processing tasks that can’t be done in parallel.

CUDA is C++

I imagine some work is also useful on CPUs, and C++ is one of the most efficient languages.

Yeah, kinda, CUDA is c++ that I can't run cppcheck or clang tidy on, and the important bits are either calls into the cu* libraries which are c style, or kernels, which are really their own thing.

Yes, kernel code is GPU style rather than CPU style.

But the CPU-drivers of CUDA are all C++. Albeit a C-like API (cudaMalloc, lol), but its a clang compiler for the CPU code nonetheless. If you have complex GPU + CPU interactions, you'll need to be a C++ expert.

Even if you aren't doing GPU work and sticking "only" with CPU-side CUDA, its all C++.

The jobs that I have been approached for in HFT have been for C not C++.

Some high throughput financial systems use Java

High throughput yes, but HFT is mostly about latency.

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