Tokyo Exchange goes Boom! Is there a link to the LSE? Could be...

This article caught my eye when Google Readering yesterday.

http://www.finextra.com/fullstory.asp?id=18058

Back in November,I noted that the LSE went Boom! and that this won't be the last time it falls over. It seems a coincidence that the Tokyo Stock Exchange is suffering performance problems and system crashes like it's technology partner the LSE. The pair "are developing jointly traded products and share technology" - oh really? that's a good idea? Same security vulnerabilities, same performance problems, same mysterious crashes then...

Word on the street also about other products based on dot net having serious, unsolvable bugs: mysterious freezes, runaway memory growth, threading issues and performance headaches, just like I experienced when building my last algo trading platform.

Mind you, this is nothing specific against dot net. I remember when I first worked in the city in 1996 doing C++ and using Roguewave libraries - what a disaster that was. Well I did promise to tell you about the eek bug back in the Haskell post so here goes: I was at my first investment bank - sigh - the good old days. One of the developers had a bug that he couldn't solve after a week - we tried everything - every debugger known - they all pointed to threading problems in the Roguewave libraries but the manufacturer was responding slowly. One day, the programmer put the string "eeek" as a printf debug. Miraculously, the bug disappeared. We tested other strings - non worked - only the eeek string did the trick.

That hardened my heart against third party libraries developed by private companies - when the bugs hit - you often have nowhere to turn. My guess is there's an eeek bug or two in the dot net stuff. If it were open source, perhaps there would be a hope of fixing it...