It appears to be mostly inertia. People learned C++ and a few relevant specialized libraries, so they keep on them.
Outside of a few relatively narrow topics like high frequency trading, trading algorithms for direct market access and solving optimizations, the speed of C++ is not needed. As a result I am observing more code development occurring in higher level languages such as Python, R, Matlab and SecDb/Slang. Extremely time or latency sensitive tasks are offloaded from these scripting languages onto broker algorithms or other third party libraries.
When I was at GS it depended highly on which teams you were on. In FICC, where I was, SecDB/Slang ran everything, but there where definitely signs that it was falling out of favour elsewhere and more Java and C# projects were emerging.
If I were to speculate, I'd say that although GS has a large technology investment in SecDB/Slang, it's still a language that was invented a long long time ago by technology standards (I don't know exactly when it emerged, but I'd say it's safely a good two decades or more old), and it just doesn't have the performance or features that new languages have with current generation compiler and JIT techniques.
Comments
It appears to be mostly inertia. People learned C++ and a few relevant specialized libraries, so they keep on them.
Outside of a few relatively narrow topics like high frequency trading, trading algorithms for direct market access and solving optimizations, the speed of C++ is not needed. As a result I am observing more code development occurring in higher level languages such as Python, R, Matlab and SecDb/Slang. Extremely time or latency sensitive tasks are offloaded from these scripting languages onto broker algorithms or other third party libraries.
SecDB/Slang outside of Goldman?
No SecDB/Slang outside of Goldman because it is completely proprietary, but the single platform vision within has no signs of abetting.
When I was at GS it depended highly on which teams you were on. In FICC, where I was, SecDB/Slang ran everything, but there where definitely signs that it was falling out of favour elsewhere and more Java and C# projects were emerging.
If I were to speculate, I'd say that although GS has a large technology investment in SecDB/Slang, it's still a language that was invented a long long time ago by technology standards (I don't know exactly when it emerged, but I'd say it's safely a good two decades or more old), and it just doesn't have the performance or features that new languages have with current generation compiler and JIT techniques.