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Comment by nh2 | Hacker News Reader

> “secret weapon” and do not advertise it

Both Standard Chartered and Barclays loudly advertise that they use Haskell.

A quick web search turns up their job offers on Reddit, and both also send people to conferences such as Haskell eXchange, to talk about their team tasks, structure, and size. Example: [1]

Their code bases were discussed on HN before, e.g. [2].

Standard Chartered also funded the development of GHCs low-latency, non-stop-the-world, incremental GC, for 2 years until it was recently released [3].

[1] https://skillsmatter.com/skillscasts/9098-haskell-in-the-lar...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13073605

[3] https://www.well-typed.com/blog/2019/10/nonmoving-gc-merge/

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Is Standard Chartered the bank that actually uses its own eager subset of Haskell and built everything in it from scratch?

I'm not sure if you're being facetious or asking a genuine question. The answer is "yes", with the exception of the word "actually". The "eager subset" was written to target a pre-existing runtime, which before then only supported an in-house, fairly poorly-designed, functional language called Lambda. Some of the team there wanted to be able to use Haskell instead (understandably).

For stuff that doesn't require that runtime (as convenient as it is) they just use familiar old lazy GHC. My understanding is that they are progressively moving more and more to GHC, although my knowledge is five years out of date.

> I'm not sure if you're being facetious or asking a genuine question.

A genuine one. I remember a presentation by a bank about their use of Haskell, and wasn't sure if it was Standard Chartered. I remember they had the subset, and mentioned they basically had to a lot from scratch to interface with various systems.

And now that I have the name, I found a link to someone's copy: https://dshevchenko.biz/hs-research/Haskell-in-the-Large.pdf (used to be available at code.haskell.org). My recollection of the paper isn't perfect :)

> My understanding is that they are progressively moving more and more to GHC, although my knowledge is five years out of date.

Ah, thank you!

Yes Standard Chartered does have its own strict Haskell scripting language (Mu). But it mostly wraps C/C++ quant libraries, it's used as a alternative to Python (because Python is a bad idea at scale). GHC is used too and is what Mu was built in.

There are numerous others who do not, though.

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