Open Source in Finance Forum London 2025

Maximizing performance is often a competitive advantage in financial applications, and for four decades, the leading language for high-performance software has been C++. However, in recent years concerns about the risk of software vulnerabilities related to memory safety and the rise of Rust, a memory-safe language which offers performance comparable to C++, have led industry-leading companies and major governments to urge for a transition away from memory-unsafe languages. The sheer volume of existing C++ code and the value it represents makes rewriting it all infeasible on a timescale less than several decades, so large C++ codebases need to invest in high-performance interoperability to mitigate risk and potentially to comply with upcoming regulatory mandates. This talk will outline the current state of this strategy and the potential for innovation which can bring greater safety to performance-critical applications within finance and beyond.