When these requirements are met, the working group recommends promotion to final technical standard. The GTC must approve. After that, the standard is immutable. However, if there is interest, subsequent versions of the standard may be initiated.
In the case of SBE version 1.0, it reached the goal of technical standard in February 2017. It met the requirements for an extended public review, but also multiple implementations were created by different authors. To prove interoperability, the GTC sponsored development of a conformance test suite. Like the SBE specification, the conformance project is open-source and resides in GitHub. Any implementer can run the test on their own SBE project while it is under development. And then they can announce conformance when work is completed if they want to share it with the world.
SBE has been implemented in C++, Java, Golang and Python programming languages. Due to its success, other implementations are likely to follow. It has proven its worth. A group that created the best-known SBE implementation claims that it can encode or decode messages about 20 times faster than a well-known message encoding put out by one of the information industry giants.
One of the early adopters was CME Group. It uses SBE for market data and internal messaging. Moscow Exchange is using SBE for derivatives messaging. Thomson Reuters has made SBE one of its supported
API formats, and a growing number of financial industry users employ it. It has even gained interest outside the financial industry due to its performance advantages.
SBE version 1.0 was the first FIX technical specification to reach final approval under the process. Work has already commenced to explore a possibly enhanced version 2.0.
We’d love to hear your feedback on this article. Please click here
