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Not necessarily. Java can be insanely performant, far more than I ever gave it credit for in the first decade of its existence. There has been a ton of optimization and you can now saturate your links even if you do fairly heavy processing. I'm still not a fan of the language but performance issues seem to be 'mostly solved'.

by nly6 hours ago|

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"Saturating your links" is rarely the goal in HFT.

You want low deterministic latency with sharp tails.

If all you care about is throughput then deep pipelines + lots of threads will get you there at the cost of latency.

by matt_heimer3 hours ago|

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You can achieve optimized C/C++ speeds, you just can't program the same way you always have. Step 1, switch your data layout from Array of Structures to Structure of Arrays. Step 2, after initial startup switch to (near) zero object creation. It's a very different way to program Java.

You have to optimize your memory usage patterns to fit in CPU cache as much as possible which is something typical Java develops don't consider. I have a background in assembly and C.

I'd say it's slightly harder since there is a little bit of abstraction but most of the time the JIT will produce code as good as C compilers. It's also an niche that often considers any application running on a general purpose CPU to be slow. If you want industry leading speed you start building custom FPGAs.

by jodleif6 hours ago|

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As long as you tune the JVM right it can be faster. But its a big if with the tune, and you need to write performant code

by andriy_koval3 hours ago|

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Java has significant overhead, that most/every object is allocated on heap, synchronized and has extra overhead of memory and performance to be GC controlled. Its very hard/not possible to tune this part.

by matt_heimer3 hours ago|

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You program differently for this niche in any language. The hot path (number crunching) thread doesn't share objects with gateway (IO) threads. Passing data between them is off heap, you avoid object creation after warm up. There is no synchronization, even volatile is something you avoid.

by andriy_koval2 hours ago|

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> Passing data between them is off heap

how exactly you are passing data? You can pass some primitives without allocating them on heap. You can use some tiny subset of Java+standard library to write high performance code, but why would you do this instead of using Rust or C++?

by matt_heimer1 hours ago|

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In some places I'm using https://github.com/aeron-io/agrona

Strangely this is one of the areas where I want to use project panama so I might re-implement some of the ring buffers constructs.

You allocate off heap memory and dump data into it. With modern Java classes like Arena, MemoryLayout, and VarHandle it's honestly a lot like C structs.

I answered "why" in another post in this thread.

by tyingq6 hours ago|

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Depends. Many reasons, but one is that Java has a much richer set of 3rd party libraries to do things versus rolling your own. And often (not always) third party libraries that have been extensively optimized, real world proven, etc.

Then things like the jit, by default, doing run time profiling and adaptation.

by andriy_koval3 hours ago|

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Java has huge ecosystem in enterprise dev, but very unlikely it has ecosystem edge in high performance/real time compute.

by roncesvalles3 hours ago|

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There are actually cases when Java (the HotSpot JVM) runs faster than the same logic written in C/C++ because the JVM is doing dynamic analysis and selective JIT compilation to machine code.

by not_kurt_godel3 hours ago|

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I personally know of an HFT firm that used Java approximately a decade ago. My guess would be they're still using it today given Java performance has only improved since then.

by andriy_koval3 hours ago|

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it doesn't mean Java is optimal or close to optimal choice. Amount of extra effort they do to achieve goals could be significant.

by jcgrillo1 hours ago|

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Optimal in what sense? In the java shops I've worked at it's usually viewed as a pretty optimal situation to have everything in one language. This makes code reuse, packaging, deployment, etc much simpler.

In terms of speed, memory usage, runtime characteristics... sure there are better options. But if java is good enough, or can be made good enough by writing the code correctly, why add another toolchain?

by andriy_koval1 hours ago|

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> But if java is good enough, or can be made good enough by writing the code correctly,

"writing code correctly" here means stripping 95% of lang capabilities, and writing in some other language which looks like C without structs (because they will be heap allocated with cross thread synchronization and GC overhead) and standard lib.

Its good enough for some tiny algo, but not good enough for anything serious.

by jcgrillo1 hours ago|

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It's good enough for the folks who choose to do it that way. Many of them do things that are quite "serious"... Databases, kafka, the lmax disruptor, and reams of performance critical proprietary code have been and continue to be written in java. It's not low effort, you have to be careful, get intimate with the garbage collector, and spend a lot of time profiling. It's a totally reasonable choice to make if your team has that expertise, you're already a java shop, etc. I no longer make the choice to use java for new code. I prefer rust. But neither choice is correct or incorrect.

by andriy_koval1 hours ago|

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> Databases, kafka, the lmax disruptor, and reams of performance critical proprietary code have been and continue to be written in java.

those have low bar of performance, also they mostly became popular because of investments from Java hype, and rust didn't exist or had weak ecosystem at that time.