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Comment by jgalt212 | Hacker News Reader

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jgalt212·

Can one write an HFT application in Go now?

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You might be able to, but it won't be because of GC times.

In HFT systems in GC'd languages or not, you don't allocate on the hot path so GC times are immaterial.

If you are measuring response in nanoseconds, 100 microseconds is still a lot.

However, it may be good enough for games at well below 1% of your time budget for a 60 fps game assuming cache locality is good enough so you don't waste too much time fetching from main memory.

Besides games it would be interesting how good Go would now work for things like low-latency audio processing (single-digit-millisecond-latency). That's some kind of classic domain where performance is not a problem but once you miss the target timeframe you are pretty fucked up (producing and hearing glitches).

I write a fair amount of low latency code in go, but none of it is hard real time. Average throughput of a few microseconds (for my simple workloads) with spikes of milliseconds here and there is what I tend to find. Fine for a lot of things but I'd be hesitant to use it for high fi audio apps that are very sensitive to latency. Humans may only be able to notice 50ms, but if you're chaining DSP you can end up with a fair bit of variance in your processing pipeline.

Here is a demo from IBM doing audio processing with their real time GC in Java.

http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_group.php?i...

Already in 2012, so even if not yet there, I think Go can get there, specially since you can take care to just stack allocate and minimise GC use during the hot tub path.

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