6 ms·

London Stock Exchange Rejects .NET For Open Source

32 points by alexandros 17y ago

brc 17y ago
I really think the headline should be: LSE dumps badly written system for (hopefully) better written system. While I'm sure .NET / Windows/ Sql Server will be the whipping boy, there are high performance Windows based systems around. Bad programmers and architects can make a hash of any technology stack. Microsoft just brought this one on themselves by trumpeting the LSE connection far and wide, before seeing if it actually worked.
- kennethh 17y ago
  I totally agree with this. The .Net stack is just as good anything else out there. This is probably just another example of Enterprise Architecture Software where one should have used a low level to the bones architecture. Stock trading system is one of the most demanding system one can make regarding latency and reliability.
- mfairview 17y ago
  +1. Well said. They're joking themselves if they think Linux + Java is any better. For systems where speed is of the essence and latency is intollerable, a managed language will simply not do whether it's .net or java.
  - chipsy 17y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_time_Java http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_time_Java
  - eru 17y ago
    Why? Are you afraid of automatic memory management? There are incremental real-time garbace collectors available. And that should be preferable to space leaks and seg-faults. Or is there any other reason you advice against using a `managed language'?
    - mfairview 17y ago
      Sorry if my comments don't agree with you. I work on a system that takes in multibillion hits a day so do know a little about this argument. What's your background? We use lots of caches to improve our speed but caching doesn't really do well for generational GC's. I do see realtime GC's on the far horizon but currently it's been on the academic front.
      - DrJokepu 17y ago
        While I haven't worked on any project demanding this kind of scalability, I'm struggling to believe that garbage collection would be a bottleneck here. Modern managed environments these days are ridiculously fast and the garbage collectors are shockingly efficient. It's not 1994 anymore. I think they are more likely to have performance issues because of the dozens of complex webservice xml-rpc calls that are required just to get a simple piece of data (as it is usual in enterprise systems).
        mfairview 17y ago
        Systems can get large enough that it would take a few seconds for GC to complete thereby causing unacceptable latency (especially if you need to meet strict SLAs). Consider a caching datastructure that needs to be constantly updated with fresh data. Objects in the cache remain there long enough to get into the final generation only to be pulled off some time later. Without memory management (e.g. object pooling for one), you'd quickly fill up your long lived generation causing the system to repeatedly want to reclaim.
      - eru 17y ago
        No offense taken. I was just arguing from an academic point of view. In the real world stuff is often much hairier, and if you can make C (or whatever you are using) to behave nicely, that's good for you. (I do not like Java either. Perhaps you should check out Ocaml? It's a nice and fast functional programming languages. The high-frequency traders at Jane Street Capital are quite fond of it. And I guess they are not too tolerant of delays.)
    - 17y ago
  - joe_the_user 17y ago
    Where is the Java reference? I have found not articles claiming the new system is in Java. Where???
- DrJokepu 17y ago
  I know a few people who worked on the project and from what I've heard that the London Stock Exchange contracted Accenture to rebuild their system and they've decided to use .NET as the underlying architecture. Now this was European "flagship" project of Accenture for the last few years but it didn't quite work out. I'm assuming (I don't know for sure) that the reasons behind the failure of the project were more like managerial issues as opposed to technical issue; like feature creep and overengineering and generally being enterprisey. I suppose they decided to scrap the project and start from scratch. In a situation like this (huge failure, firefighting and starting again) it might make sense to start again on a different platform if only for psychological reasons.
- rbanffy 17y ago
  Would you trust a surgeon who chooses to operate you with a hacksaw, a fork and a baseball bat? I wouldn't. Choice of tools say a lot about a professional.
  - sokoloff 17y ago
    If you set the Microsoft .net tools side by side with Emacs, gdb et al, I don't think that it's the Microsoft tools that look like forks and baseball bats. This coming from a guy who after 20+ years still launches Emacs as my first app, but even I have to admit that Visual Studio is more productive for slinging typical .Net code than even Emacs, at least for me. (And yes, I understand your point wasn't specifically about tool UI and developer productivity exactly.)
StrawberryFrog 17y ago
I've seen this one before. Dupe?
- jacquesm 17y ago
  yep. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=865286 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=865286
- steveklabnik 17y ago
  The /. article even links to... a /. article! From July!
  - wglb 17y ago
    The july article told of their decision to go away from .net; this latest article tells of the replacement that LSE purchased.
    - steveklabnik 17y ago
      Ah. I didn't even see that there was a latest article. For some reason, the wording didn't really indicate to me that this was an additional development, I just assumed it was yet another repost of an old topic.
    - StrawberryFrog 17y ago
      The ill-informed commentary on /, and Hn (and on reddit somewhere) is the real dupe.
ScottWhigham 17y ago
I love how you can see the MSFT hatred in the voting for comments on this submission. Looking at the comments, none of them are down-vote worthy yet some fools just can't help themselves. And yes, I'm fully aware that I will be down-voted to oblivion for this.
- Daishiman 17y ago
  But you do know the reason why this situation is highlighted in because Microsoft touted this as an example of the success of the .NET platform? That's what we call a pretty hard fail.
  - jwhitlark 17y ago
    These links speak for themselves: MS Ad: http://tipotheday.com/2008/09/08/microsofts-foot-in-mouth-london-stock-exchange/ http://tipotheday.com/2008/09/08/microsofts-foot-in-mouth-lo... MS Case Study: http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?CaseStudyID=200042 http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?...
rbanffy 17y ago
Dumping .NET for Java seems like dumping a Buick to buy a Chevrolet. They share a common set of flaws - both apparently tend to produce overcomplicated designs and generally "enterprisey" solutions. It would be much more interesting news if they went with Erlang, Scala, Clojure on top of Hadoop or something like it ;-) but I bet no "enterprise consultant" over there wants to bet the career on that. Shame. I would give it a shot. Considering the productivity gap between a Java (and C#) developer and one on any modern dynamic language, they could afford to try 5 different approaches on 5 different technologies within the same budget and have time to spare to benchmark each one to select the best solution.
- nopal 17y ago
  I know that it's popular to bash Java and .NET right now, and that it's popular to hype Erlang, Scala, Clojure and Hadoop, but I don't think that replacing Java or .NET (frameworks, both) with a great language and Hadoop (written in Java) is the silver bullet your're implying it is. It's easy to bash the "enterprise consultant" with a wink, especially without having been in that consultant's shoes. Let's try to avoid the whole Java/.NET/Enterprise BAD, Erlang/Hadoop GOOD mentality. Let's have an honest debate of technology and how it applies to a specific application.
  - rbanffy 17y ago
    Believe me, I had my fair share of enterprise consultancy in my 20's. It's easy to get sucked into the mentality that there are some technologies that are suitable for "enterprise development" and even that there is such a thing as an "enterprise application". There is no such division. There are approaches and technologies that are more or less productive and more or less easily applied to the problem at hand. The choice of technology in a consultancy bears more relation to covering exits and the possibility of blaming a vendor that can protect you from your client if the project fails than ensuring it doesn't. I mentioned Hadoop as a counterpart to the Oracle RDBMS that quite probably what persists the data the application is using.
- dtf 17y ago
  Forgive me if I missed something, but where exactly does it say they're switching to Java? The slashdot blurb says they're "ditching .NET for GNU/Linux" (which doesn't even make sense to me - it's kind of like saying we're ditching Python and re-implementing everything in FreeBSD). The linked press releases mention only a mixture of Solaris and Linux. It all seems like a load of hot air - no technical details whatsoever. Frankly it won't surprise me if they royally muck this one up too. For an example of a trading platform project done right (with internal development teams initially competing against each other), read about BetFair's FlyWheel: http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/nov2007/gb20071116_426729.htm http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/nov2007/gb2007...
amix 17y ago
This seems like a spin. They seem to be outsourcing this to Sri Lanka by buying MillenniumIT, which is a Sri Lanka developer ("Compared to the bill of $65 million for TradElect, MillenniumIT, a Sri Lankan developer, is a bargain at $30 million." 1)) Is this Windows or .Net's fault? I really doubt it. .Net is a great platform and offers performance similar to Java/C/C++. Will it help to switch the platform to Java? Probably not, unless MillenniumIT are much better programmers than developers from Accenture. Open-source does not prevent you from making fatal mistakes or do bad code. 1) http://www.ibspublishing.com/index.cfm?section=news&action=view&id=13440 http://www.ibspublishing.com/index.cfm?section=news&acti...
- ks 17y ago
  MillenniumIT already has a high performance trading platform in use by other stock exchanges
known 17y ago
Slashdot will have the best sarcastic comments ever http://linux.slashdot.org/story/09/10/06/1742203/London-Stock-Exchange-Rejects-NET-For-Open-Source http://linux.slashdot.org/story/09/10/06/1742203/London-Stoc...
kolleyk 17y ago
This is simple. Accenture do not want a project to be simple and easy. They make less money. It has to be as complicated and as buggy as possible to get the consultants in. It's just a business plan, repeated again and again across the UK. Nothing to do with the tech.

32 points by alexandros 17y ago

brc 17y ago

I really think the headline should be: LSE dumps badly written system for (hopefully) better written system. While I'm sure .NET / Windows/ Sql Server will be the whipping boy, there are high performance Windows based systems around. Bad programmers and architects can make a hash of any technology stack. Microsoft just brought this one on themselves by trumpeting the LSE connection far and wide, before seeing if it actually worked.

kennethh 17y ago
I totally agree with this. The .Net stack is just as good anything else out there. This is probably just another example of Enterprise Architecture Software where one should have used a low level to the bones architecture. Stock trading system is one of the most demanding system one can make regarding latency and reliability.
mfairview 17y ago
+1. Well said. They're joking themselves if they think Linux + Java is any better. For systems where speed is of the essence and latency is intollerable, a managed language will simply not do whether it's .net or java.
- chipsy 17y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_time_Java http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_time_Java
- eru 17y ago
  Why? Are you afraid of automatic memory management? There are incremental real-time garbace collectors available. And that should be preferable to space leaks and seg-faults. Or is there any other reason you advice against using a `managed language'?
  - mfairview 17y ago
    Sorry if my comments don't agree with you. I work on a system that takes in multibillion hits a day so do know a little about this argument. What's your background? We use lots of caches to improve our speed but caching doesn't really do well for generational GC's. I do see realtime GC's on the far horizon but currently it's been on the academic front.
    - DrJokepu 17y ago
      While I haven't worked on any project demanding this kind of scalability, I'm struggling to believe that garbage collection would be a bottleneck here. Modern managed environments these days are ridiculously fast and the garbage collectors are shockingly efficient. It's not 1994 anymore. I think they are more likely to have performance issues because of the dozens of complex webservice xml-rpc calls that are required just to get a simple piece of data (as it is usual in enterprise systems).
      - mfairview 17y ago
        Systems can get large enough that it would take a few seconds for GC to complete thereby causing unacceptable latency (especially if you need to meet strict SLAs). Consider a caching datastructure that needs to be constantly updated with fresh data. Objects in the cache remain there long enough to get into the final generation only to be pulled off some time later. Without memory management (e.g. object pooling for one), you'd quickly fill up your long lived generation causing the system to repeatedly want to reclaim.
    - eru 17y ago
      No offense taken. I was just arguing from an academic point of view. In the real world stuff is often much hairier, and if you can make C (or whatever you are using) to behave nicely, that's good for you. (I do not like Java either. Perhaps you should check out Ocaml? It's a nice and fast functional programming languages. The high-frequency traders at Jane Street Capital are quite fond of it. And I guess they are not too tolerant of delays.)
  - 17y ago
- joe_the_user 17y ago
  Where is the Java reference? I have found not articles claiming the new system is in Java. Where???
DrJokepu 17y ago
I know a few people who worked on the project and from what I've heard that the London Stock Exchange contracted Accenture to rebuild their system and they've decided to use .NET as the underlying architecture. Now this was European "flagship" project of Accenture for the last few years but it didn't quite work out. I'm assuming (I don't know for sure) that the reasons behind the failure of the project were more like managerial issues as opposed to technical issue; like feature creep and overengineering and generally being enterprisey. I suppose they decided to scrap the project and start from scratch. In a situation like this (huge failure, firefighting and starting again) it might make sense to start again on a different platform if only for psychological reasons.
rbanffy 17y ago
Would you trust a surgeon who chooses to operate you with a hacksaw, a fork and a baseball bat? I wouldn't. Choice of tools say a lot about a professional.
- sokoloff 17y ago
  If you set the Microsoft .net tools side by side with Emacs, gdb et al, I don't think that it's the Microsoft tools that look like forks and baseball bats. This coming from a guy who after 20+ years still launches Emacs as my first app, but even I have to admit that Visual Studio is more productive for slinging typical .Net code than even Emacs, at least for me. (And yes, I understand your point wasn't specifically about tool UI and developer productivity exactly.)

StrawberryFrog 17y ago

I've seen this one before. Dupe?

jacquesm 17y ago
yep. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=865286 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=865286
steveklabnik 17y ago
The /. article even links to... a /. article! From July!
- wglb 17y ago
  The july article told of their decision to go away from .net; this latest article tells of the replacement that LSE purchased.
  - steveklabnik 17y ago
    Ah. I didn't even see that there was a latest article. For some reason, the wording didn't really indicate to me that this was an additional development, I just assumed it was yet another repost of an old topic.
  - StrawberryFrog 17y ago
    The ill-informed commentary on /, and Hn (and on reddit somewhere) is the real dupe.

ScottWhigham 17y ago

I love how you can see the MSFT hatred in the voting for comments on this submission. Looking at the comments, none of them are down-vote worthy yet some fools just can't help themselves. And yes, I'm fully aware that I will be down-voted to oblivion for this.

Daishiman 17y ago
But you do know the reason why this situation is highlighted in because Microsoft touted this as an example of the success of the .NET platform? That's what we call a pretty hard fail.
- jwhitlark 17y ago
  These links speak for themselves: MS Ad: http://tipotheday.com/2008/09/08/microsofts-foot-in-mouth-london-stock-exchange/ http://tipotheday.com/2008/09/08/microsofts-foot-in-mouth-lo... MS Case Study: http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?CaseStudyID=200042 http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?...

rbanffy 17y ago

Dumping .NET for Java seems like dumping a Buick to buy a Chevrolet. They share a common set of flaws - both apparently tend to produce overcomplicated designs and generally "enterprisey" solutions. It would be much more interesting news if they went with Erlang, Scala, Clojure on top of Hadoop or something like it ;-) but I bet no "enterprise consultant" over there wants to bet the career on that. Shame. I would give it a shot. Considering the productivity gap between a Java (and C#) developer and one on any modern dynamic language, they could afford to try 5 different approaches on 5 different technologies within the same budget and have time to spare to benchmark each one to select the best solution.

nopal 17y ago
I know that it's popular to bash Java and .NET right now, and that it's popular to hype Erlang, Scala, Clojure and Hadoop, but I don't think that replacing Java or .NET (frameworks, both) with a great language and Hadoop (written in Java) is the silver bullet your're implying it is. It's easy to bash the "enterprise consultant" with a wink, especially without having been in that consultant's shoes. Let's try to avoid the whole Java/.NET/Enterprise BAD, Erlang/Hadoop GOOD mentality. Let's have an honest debate of technology and how it applies to a specific application.
- rbanffy 17y ago
  Believe me, I had my fair share of enterprise consultancy in my 20's. It's easy to get sucked into the mentality that there are some technologies that are suitable for "enterprise development" and even that there is such a thing as an "enterprise application". There is no such division. There are approaches and technologies that are more or less productive and more or less easily applied to the problem at hand. The choice of technology in a consultancy bears more relation to covering exits and the possibility of blaming a vendor that can protect you from your client if the project fails than ensuring it doesn't. I mentioned Hadoop as a counterpart to the Oracle RDBMS that quite probably what persists the data the application is using.
dtf 17y ago
Forgive me if I missed something, but where exactly does it say they're switching to Java? The slashdot blurb says they're "ditching .NET for GNU/Linux" (which doesn't even make sense to me - it's kind of like saying we're ditching Python and re-implementing everything in FreeBSD). The linked press releases mention only a mixture of Solaris and Linux. It all seems like a load of hot air - no technical details whatsoever. Frankly it won't surprise me if they royally muck this one up too. For an example of a trading platform project done right (with internal development teams initially competing against each other), read about BetFair's FlyWheel: http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/nov2007/gb20071116_426729.htm http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/nov2007/gb2007...

amix 17y ago

This seems like a spin. They seem to be outsourcing this to Sri Lanka by buying MillenniumIT, which is a Sri Lanka developer ("Compared to the bill of $65 million for TradElect, MillenniumIT, a Sri Lankan developer, is a bargain at $30 million." 1)) Is this Windows or .Net's fault? I really doubt it. .Net is a great platform and offers performance similar to Java/C/C++. Will it help to switch the platform to Java? Probably not, unless MillenniumIT are much better programmers than developers from Accenture. Open-source does not prevent you from making fatal mistakes or do bad code. 1) http://www.ibspublishing.com/index.cfm?section=news&action=view&id=13440 http://www.ibspublishing.com/index.cfm?section=news&acti...

ks 17y ago
MillenniumIT already has a high performance trading platform in use by other stock exchanges

known 17y ago

Slashdot will have the best sarcastic comments ever http://linux.slashdot.org/story/09/10/06/1742203/London-Stock-Exchange-Rejects-NET-For-Open-Source http://linux.slashdot.org/story/09/10/06/1742203/London-Stoc...

kolleyk 17y ago

This is simple. Accenture do not want a project to be simple and easy. They make less money. It has to be as complicated and as buggy as possible to get the consultants in. It's just a business plan, repeated again and again across the UK. Nothing to do with the tech.