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Comment by christofd | Hacker News Reader

hmm... I was surprised several years back by the announcement when LSE (London Stock Exchange) moved to MSFT server products, since people in banking mostly tell me that Java/Unix is standard.

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There is no "standard". In any investment bank you'll find everything from MUMPS to MATLAB, VAX Pascal, APL, Haskell. The result of a) many acquisitions and mergers and b) a culture of if you need something, build it yourself, out of whatever you have to hand. I've seen NeXTStep and OS/2 and even an Amiga on trading floors.

Wait a sec, that's not infrastructure there running in individual trading departments. Major transactional backbones in banking almost all run on Java/Unix as I understand.

For the really mission-critical systems there's more COBOL, C++ and even VAX Basic (I'm not kidding) than there is Java, and there's a lot of mainframe and VMS too, and weird Unixes like Dynix. A lot of it is stuff that people outside the industry will never even see anymore.

One project I worked on in fixed income was C++ based, it could handle a few hundred trades per second on modest kit. When I left I think the J2EE rewrite was up to 6 trades per minute...

Thanks for the insights! Yes, my friend's dad in Munich used to program the main software handling Hypo-Vereinsbank's transactions and it was all in COBOL (a previous programmer had introduced a small rounding error, which resulted in havoc... good story).

Very interesting to see this diversity of systems.

Transactional backbones run COBOL, not Java. Only the inter-system interfaces uses Java and other "new" languages. However, most of them run on Unix...as in, versions of Unix that are older than the internet.

aaarghhh Mumps...

what do you mean you reset the editor string ?

If people in banking tell you that Java/Unix is standard (which it is), why does one exchange moving some components to MSFT products impress you?

I was surprised that a major stock exchange would pick something that is not standard.

These things are often of such a scale and real-time response requirement that simple standard solutions just won't get it done.

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