Developer Guide
Welcome to the developer guide for PoseiTrader!
Here you'll find guidance on developing and extending PoseiTrader to meet your trading needs or to contribute improvements back to the project.
We believe in using the right tool for the job. The overall design philosophy is to fully utilize the high level power of Python, with its rich eco-system of frameworks and libraries, whilst overcoming some of its inherent shortcomings in performance and lack of built-in type safety (with it being an interpreted dynamic language).
One of the advantages of Cython is that allocation and freeing of memory is handled by the C code generator during the ‘cythonization’ step of the build (unless you’re specifically utilizing some of its lower level features).
This approach combines Python’s simplicity with near-native C performance via compiled extensions.
The main development and runtime environment we
are working in is of course Python. With the
introduction of Cython syntax throughout the
production codebase in .pyx and
.pxd files - it’s important to be
aware of how the CPython implementation of Python
interacts with the underlying CPython API, and the
PoseiTrader C extension modules which Cython
produces.
We recommend a thorough review of the Cython docs to familiarize yourself with some of its core concepts, and where C typing is being introduced.
It's not necessary to become a C language
expert, however it's helpful to understand
how Cython C syntax is used in function and method
definitions, in local code blocks, and the common
primitive C types and how these map to their
corresponding PyObject types.