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Comment by keep_reading | Hacker News Reader

> Goldman Sach uses Erlang in its hedge-fund trading platform for its low-latency (microseconds) event-driven order-submission engine.

if it's good enough for a hedge fund HFT platform, it's good enough for anyone aiming for low latency

https://medium.com/hybrid-cloud-engineering/beam-otp-on-ocp-...

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It's used for monitoring, not the actual trading. The Erlang scheduler is fantastic, but it targets a context switch roughly every 1ms, it's obviously not suitable for HFT where a process must respond to a network event within microseconds.

https://hackernoon.com/successful-companies-use-erlang-and-e...

> Erlang is used as part of the real-time monitoring solution for this distributed trading system.

http://zerohedge.blogspot.com/2009/07/is-case-of-quant-tradi...

> Implemented a real-time monitoring solution for the distributed trading system using a combination of technologies (SNMP, Erlang/OTP, boost, ACE, TibcoRV, real-time distributed replicated database, etc) to monitor load and health of trading processes in the mother-ship and co-located sites so that trading decisions can be prioritized based on congestion and queuing delays.

This is almost certainly incorrect, unless it’s using a very stretched definition of “hft” and using microseconds to mean 99th% <1ms instead of say <5us (reasonably competitive software range depending on your trade).

They might be forwarding non latency sensitive client/internal orders through a system written in erlang, or using erlang for an orchestration layer, but they’re not competing with other hft traders in one.

Source: I work in the field and have built <5us systems.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NH1Tta7purM Is a free great watch about the things you have to do to very reliably have such low latencies

Was it HFT or just processing large client orders? I'm having a hard time finding this out

It could be the C++ for executing trades and BEAM for the client orders. Obviously you'd want something like C++ there when you're racing. Though if they did the trading as a C++ NIF it could all still run on the BEAM avoiding a memory copy. Interesting thought exercise anyway.

It's hard to find details though.

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