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given the high latency with the exchanges the choice of language seems an unnecessary risk

The main bitcoin codebase is in C++ so C++ has the most mature library and best support for the protocol.

Other implementations, including two Javascript ones and a Go one, have had significant bugs in handling the protocol correctly.

Seems like a pointless risk and waste of time to use any non-c++ language for dealing with the BTC protocol

Does the library directly use the Bitcoin protocol? I had the impression that it only uses the Rest API of the individual exchanges interact with them.

Your impression was correct, the only crypto this touches is signing API calls to the REST APIs of exchanges.

This is a bit of a orthogonal argument as this only deals with exchanges directly and never touches the Bitcoin protocol directly. Agreed that the choice of language is an odd one as there's no "high performance"/HFT involved here.

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