Picking Java feels interesting given that it’s a database. I would love to know their justification for the choice.
Although - I have known a trading firm that wrote their platform in Java, offloading any disk and network access to some limited C++ and JNI. In their case I believe they simply allocated large buffers that C++ pushed and pulled data from. The benefit of this strategy was their Quants could build memory-safe strategies and in a much friendlier language. For them if eliminated the risk of bad code and lost time to debugging awful C++ errors.
To my knowledge it all worked for them quite well, they made good money and any minor differences of speed in Java were negligible to them.
Although - I have known a trading firm that wrote their platform in Java, offloading any disk and network access to some limited C++ and JNI. In their case I believe they simply allocated large buffers that C++ pushed and pulled data from. The benefit of this strategy was their Quants could build memory-safe strategies and in a much friendlier language. For them if eliminated the risk of bad code and lost time to debugging awful C++ errors.
To my knowledge it all worked for them quite well, they made good money and any minor differences of speed in Java were negligible to them.