I grant him his point about simple architectures but now I'm interested in more technical details about Wave's architecture? He mentioned synchronous Python... everything about that sentence goes against what I've learned about network programming. Python is single-threaded, and blocking I/O means that any APIs built with it couldn't handle other customers waiting. Unless they're processed so fast that there's no appearance of delays?
Something that seems apparent with handling money in accounting systems (and trading systems) is you can't really do concurrency any way. If someone changes their account you need to lock those database records from access to any other thread and make everything atomic. Otherwise it can lead to race conditions where the same funds can be spent multiple times (this is something that has effected Bitcoin exchanges before quite ironically.) So maybe they use a sequential design because it makes more sense from an accounting perspective and eliminates the potential for race conditions? But then I'm still very curious about how performant such an approach is?
Something that seems apparent with handling money in accounting systems (and trading systems) is you can't really do concurrency any way. If someone changes their account you need to lock those database records from access to any other thread and make everything atomic. Otherwise it can lead to race conditions where the same funds can be spent multiple times (this is something that has effected Bitcoin exchanges before quite ironically.) So maybe they use a sequential design because it makes more sense from an accounting perspective and eliminates the potential for race conditions? But then I'm still very curious about how performant such an approach is?