Jane Street enlists interns in its quest for OCAML to replace Rust
In the world of electronic trading, where C++ holds so much dominance, most other programming languages are fighting for second place. Jane Street has long been looking to a direct rival in Rust to bolster its own preferred language, OCAML, and it's even getting its 2024 intern class involved.
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Earlier this week, Jane Street CTO Ron Minsky published the firm's yearly spotlight for its intern projects, 'What the interns have wrought.' Minksy said that one of this year's projects, by ex-Two Sigma intern Arya Maheshwani, involved replacing a Rust library used by the firm with an in-house one built in OCAML.
Polars is a dataframe library used to rival Pandas, a Python-based favorite of many quants. It's built with performance in mind, but for the moment it only officially supports three languages: Rust, Python and JavaScript.
This is a problem for Jane Street, which works in OCAML. The firm previously wrote bindings for Polars in OCAML, but Minsky says its implementation "hasn't been perfect." Jane Street lacks a "good incremental build story for Rust," and its slow build times can be "a real drag to the development process."
Enter Camels, Maheshwani's new library and intern project. Minsky says that what sets Maheshwani's Camels library apart is that it separates syntax from semantics; writing lines of code "produces an expression that describes the computation to be run." It's not finished, but Minksy calls it "a pretty great starting place."
Camels isn't the first thing OCAML has borrowed from Rust. Last year, Jane Street engineer Max Slater (a former intern who joined full-time in 2022) described how OCAML can emulate its efforts to forbid shared mutability. Richard Eisenberg, a functional language designer at Jane Street, also praised its low-level memory control.
Outside of Jane Street, Rust seems the more popular bet. Engineers in the prop trading space are experimenting with it in their spare time, and it gets a lot more adulation from alternative sectors such as big tech and crypto. Nonetheless, both languages carry the intrinsic risk of limiting your employment prospects, due to the lack of well-paying jobs available in each language. Then again, those who learned C++ experience those same fears too.
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