Welcome to the Adaptive blog!

In this first post we will be talking about Simple Binary Encoder, aka SBE.

Martin Thompson – ex CTO at LMAX, now Real Logic – and Todd Montgomery – ex 29WEST CTO, now Informatica – have been working on a reference implementation for Simple Binary Encoding, a new marshalling standard for low/ultra low latency FIX.

My colleagues and I at Adaptive Consulting have been porting their Java and C++ APIs to .NET.

Why?

You are probably wondering “why are those guys reinventing the wheel? serialization is a solved problem..”

In many cases I would say you are right, but when it comes to low latency, and/or high throughput, systems this can become a limiting factor. Some time ago I built an FX price distribution engine for a major financial institution and managed to get reasonable latencies at 5x throughput of normal market conditions: sub-millisecond between reading…