In a FIX

I have spent the past week+ trying to implement a FIX connection to a new order venue and I'm still struggling with it. While I have great respect for the ubiquity of FIX, I find it an extremely frustrating experience. Nearly every provider implements their own dialect of FIX, forcing time-consuming tweaks to get the language just right. And of course, encountering a bug in production can be devastating, often incurring lengthy downtimes, or, even worse, trading errors. Yipes.

We use the QuickFix engine and it's proven to be reliable and attractively priced (i.e. free). What's more, because it's open source, it's not difficult to track down and resolve the inevitable compatibility issues that arise during acceptance testing. Well, not any more difficult that any other C++ application would be a similar situation (see my previous comments regarding C++ vs. C#).