It’s finally spring and with the “extra hour” courtesy of the DST change you might think the entire Marketcetera team would be out “spring-snowboarding” at Squaw in Tahoe. Well, the snow is slushy, so let’s talk about “the other” Spring instead. Since version 0.2, we are using the Spring Framework to do IoC-based configuration of our server-side components, and we love it. Many transformations of our code become almost trivial when using Spring. As an example, we have recently been working on supporting all versions of the FIX Protocol in our OMS. Until now the OMS only supported FIX.4.2. While that is likely the most common dialect of the protocol, we needed to be able to choose a version of FIX at deploy-time.

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The Java VM is an impressive beast. In theory, features like dynamic optimization and compilation and concurrent garbage collection promise great performance gains. But in benchmarks at the Computer Language Shootout, performance numbers still appear to be lacking.

The Computer Language Shootout is good research. Complete disclosure of methods (for maximum reproducibility), an adversarial method for developing implementations and the breadth of language and compiler coverage all make for a solid data set. However I began to wonder about the fact that for each benchmark results are only published for one set of inputs. Update: As Isaac Gouy points out, there are actually three results reported, see comments below. For example for the binarytree benchmark, only one tree-depth is used, specifically 16. This value may be an arbitrary choice, it may be chosen to keep the runtimes in some range, regardless, there is only one.

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