I'm a die hard Linux man myself. Lashings of fun. Couldn't live without cron to start my stuff and piping... don't get me started Check out the julia library it's fun. He did a great job.
No, I never worked at IB specifically... other broker-dealers though, in my younger days, and so I can easily imagine what it's like there. As far as why their software is hated? IDK, I have to imagine it's a combination of mostly two things... building robust computer software systems is difficult and often frustrating work with a trading system people get blinded by greed and forget that the goal is to create value, the money is a happy side-effect Just my 2 cents.
I am an engineer and have built several wholesale treasury back office systems. I code every day for fun and would NEVER ask IB any coding questions. Why bother? I can swing by the coffee shop on Jackson and talk to the hedge fund quants about all kinds of things. There's Wilmott as well for the weird stuff and the sisslers at Stanford for next gen agentic stuff. Why bother with IB. I understand why you are taking that position but it's wrong.
eeemm no, I am talking about a piece of shit written in Java that eats half of your RAM for no apparent reason if you add two charts to it. As well as you being literally scared to move a single fucking window because it is going to disappear to never be seen again. That kind of piece of shit.
You seem like a python man so check out https://github.com/marimo-team/marimo lashings of fun. I'm going to work on the next gen stuff using it starting with static dataframes and move them into matrices updated with realtime feeds. I'm going to stop following this thread now as it's getting "odd"
GUI's suck in general? I re-write what I need and run only the IBGW. I even wish the IBGW was "headless" and ran as a daemon like Apache. However, most customers would probably hate that even more.
Ok, sure. But for some reason you're complaining about the wait time to get in touch w/ IB support? That doesn't make sense. How often do you have to have your password reset? I think I reached out to IB support about 5 times in 15 years.
No, sorry I can't hate Python enough. I'll stay with C#, nearly as fast as C++ and easy to use. I see shadows and dead people when I have to write code without curly braces and no strong typed objects. I do run the Gateway and build my own UI, I get too angry when I open TWS for anything.
This project aims at that https://github.com/gnzsnz/ib-gateway-docker You would have a similar behavior if you run a docker instance. I haven't tried it myself but I've heard good things about it.
I've had my own version of something like that for a few years now already. It's a cheap hack of course since the GUI will get shown somewhere. I don't actually mind the IBGW GUI though. It's not as nice as being able to use systemctl or initd (for example) but they have the two-factor login requirement so there's got to be some compromise.