Antony Peacock knows a thing or two about the use of C++ in finance. A senior C++ developer at Maven Securities, he’s a member of the C++ standards committee and has worked on trading technology since 2008. Before he joined Maven, Peacock was a quantitative developer at hedge fund Citadel. And before he joined Citadel, he was a quantitative analyst at Barclays and Citi. He’s been coding in C++ for more than two decades.
“You can become a reasonably good C++ programmer in a short period of time, but to become an expert takes a very, very long time,” says Peacock. “There are a lot of mistakes you can make in the language and hundreds of rules you have to remember. It’s very, very complicated, and you learn through years of pitfalls and mistakes and fixing other people’s bugs and code.”
Start learning C++ young
Peacock learned C++ while he was still at university, where he specialized in coding for video games. “My dissertation was like 100,000 lines of code in C++,” he says. “It may not have been very good C++, and there are huge amounts that I still don’t know, but I spent hours and hours practicing the skill – I still find that a lot of the best C++ developers are self-taught.”
Modern C++ is really a whole new language compared to pre-C++11. It just as powerful as before, yet as easy-to-use as Java or Python.
Most detractors have 2 basic reasons for not liking it. One, they think they need to learn the whole language, and two, they don’t understand many of the best features of the language.
The problem today is that too few universities teach students how to code in C++, says Peacock. While some, like Baruch, still teach the language as a means of differentiating their students, many have switched to teaching much easier languages like Python instead.
Python vs. C++
Python is great for prototypes, but not so much for building trading systems, says Peacock. “It’s almost like a toy language,” he says, before quickly correcting himself for fear of upsetting Python developers. “- Python is a serious language, but it’s a tool that has its place. You can use it for building quick prototypes, but it’s not a language that has the level of robustness that you’d want if you’re trading billions of dollars.”
Unlike Python, C++ has a static compiler that makes you correct your errors as you go along. By comparison, Python is a dynamically typed language, which only reveals whether the code will work correctly when you actually try to run it. For this reason, Peacock says Python can be a frustrating language to work with: “Python is very liberating – it allows you to express thoughts very quickly and concisely without having to worry too much about how you express the language, but there are a lot of people in finance who spend a lot of their time debugging existing Python code.”
There’s also “a lot of bad C++” in finance, says Peacock, but the language is of a different order to …….