Hobbes¶
Hobbes is a domain-targeting programming language and execution environment built and maintained at Morgan Stanley.
By design, it fulfills three major goals:
- Dynamic, in-process rewriting of processing rules for domain objects (trades, orders, executions)
- Persistence and out-of-band processing of structured logs for order managers and surrounding processes
- Rock solid, ultra-low latency execution
Hobbes was developed to manage the runtime of low-latency processes such as equities trading engines, which generally cannot be restarted during the working day.
The target user base is the development and production management teams responsible for building and maintaining these processes in production. As such, Hobbes is obsessively pragmatic: the vast majority of design choices are aimed at fulfilling these needs.
Perhaps most surprisingly, Hobbes is a variant of the pure-functional programming language Haskell. The following is an example of some Hobbes code from a production system at Morgan Stanley:
nil :: () -> (^x.(()+(a*x)))
nil _ = roll(|0=()|)
cons :: (a, ^x.(()+(a*x))) -> (^x.(()+(a*x)))
cons x xs = roll(|1=(x,xs)|)
Read on to discover more about the Hobbes language - its design and purpose, and how you can use it in your systems!
Note
Hobbes Usage
Hobbes is built for high performance integration with C/C++ applications. While Hobbes is a strongly typed language that offers compile-time checks, it doesn’t have a sandboxed runtime environment or runtime safety features. By design, Hobbes gives direct access to memory and does not have array bounds checks. Additionally, Hobbes supports compilation and execution of native code remotely over a network (RPC). This feature is meant for use within your trusted internal network only. If you choose to utilize such functionality, you need to be aware of these design choices and understand the security implications.