Presumably Jane Street didn’t choose C++ because they wanted to reduce bugs introduced by the preservation of state; the killer of prop shops. F# was developed six years after their founding, hence too young, and more importantly, a Microsoft-owned clone of OCaml. I don’t think it even ran on Linux before 2015. Today, F# might just suit the job, assuming you are open to being locked into the .NET family. An interesting idea to say the least.

Why C++ now? Still the fastest and tons of quants and highly skilled programmers know it. When you consider the correlation between C++ developers’ technical acumen and quantitative skills, coupled with the maturity and increasing convenience of the ecosystem, it makes sense.