[This message was posted by Russell Curry of Assimilate Technology, Inc. <[email protected]> to the "General Q/A" discussion forum at http://fixprotocol.org/discuss/22. You can reply to it on-line at http://fixprotocol.org/discuss/read/bd0b0685 - PLEASE DO NOT REPLY BY MAIL.]
> Hello, > > We are trying to build a case for this. If anyone has an > article/information please circulate it. > > Information so far we have got : 90 of the market use UNIX to run their > FIX engine. There have been concerns around Windows locking up and not > being able to log onto a box and diagnose the problem. Also, the multi- > threading in UNIX is key for performance and tuning reasons. At same > time windows based solution is cost effective. > > Thanks for your help Deepak Hi Deepak, Talk about a loaded question ;-) In terms of Windows vs Unix for electronic trading application, it's just a question of horses for courses - both are extremely capable general purpose operating systems, and if you stay close to the iron you can great solutions on either system. The problem on the Windows side is that there is an awful lot of bleeding-edge junk you can drag into developing applications, and that, in turn, can lead to some serious reliability issues - if you have a bunch of "Magazine Developers" (as a friend of mine likes to call them) who insist on running to the latest and greatest stuff touted in this month's issue of MSDN magazine, then you're definitely going to find yourself in a lot of trouble. If you do the same thing on Windows that most people do on Unix - stick with a set of more established, albeit legacy, technologies, then you won't find yourself in as much trouble. Obviously, the quality of your development staff has a lot to do with the quality of your project's output as well, but the reality is that on the Windows platform there are just so many different ways to get yourself into trouble by over-engineering/complicating things with bleeding-edge technologies - and when the project ultimately crashes and burns, the developers then turn around and blame the platform rather than their own poor engineering choices. Having spent about 18 years writing software on PCs, I honestly think that NT 4 was about the last time I had to deal with a problematic operating system from Redmond - and much of that had to do with driver issues and other peripheral problems. The term "economy of mechanism" which is thrown about quite a bit in the secure computing world, is the key here - the more complicated you make something, the harder it is to assure it and the more likely it is that it will do something unexpected. [You can unsubscribe from this discussion group by sending a message to mailto:[email protected]] -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Financial Information eXchange" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/fix-protocol?hl=en.
