// the find
chronoxor/CppTrader
High performance components for building Trading Platform such as ultra fast matching engine, order book processor
CppTrader is a C++ library of low-latency trading infrastructure components: a matching engine, order book, and NASDAQ ITCH 5.0 parser. It's aimed at developers building exchange-adjacent systems who need proven, benchmarked primitives rather than rolling their own from scratch.
The benchmark numbers are real and detailed — 24ns ITCH message latency on a 2014 i7 is credible and the methodology is reproducible with public NASDAQ sample files. The optimized market manager progression is genuinely instructive: it walks through three explicit optimization levels with documented tradeoffs (sorted arrays vs red-black trees, pool allocation, fixed-size pre-allocation), which is more honest than most performance-focused repos. Cross-platform CI across Linux/macOS/Windows with four different Windows toolchains (VS, MinGW, MSYS2, Cygwin) is unusual and valuable for a C++ library. The ITCH handler covers the full NASDAQ ITCH 5.0 spec with a bundled PDF and sample file, so you can validate against real data without chasing down external resources.
The benchmark hardware is a 2014 i7-4790K running Windows 8 — that's stale, and modern server hardware (NUMA topology, different cache hierarchies) will produce different numbers that you'll have to measure yourself. The 'aggressive optimized' version strips out symbols, the market handler callback interface, and most useful fields to hit 102ns — at that point it's more a proof-of-concept than usable code, but it's not clearly labeled as such. The `gil` dependency manager is the author's own tool with minimal adoption outside their own repos, so the build setup is non-standard and fragile if you want to integrate this into an existing CMake project. Tests exist but are thin — `test.cpp` is minimal and the matching engine scenarios are text files rather than assertions, so there's no safety net for correctness regressions.