Thread

A brief history of the Bloomberg terminal

395 points · 171 comments · rbanffy

Flex247A · 1790785776 · focus · HN ↗
Any idea on what technologies/toolkits are used to build Bloomberg terminal?
1. apaprocki · 1790785982 · focus · HN ↗
  Nowadays the desktop software is built around Chromium. Lots of C++ and one of the largest JS codebases in the world.
  1. nxobject · 1790786438 · focus · HN ↗
    > largest JS codebases in the world.
    I'd love to know how they make frontends as responsive as possible. To the engineering blog!
    apaprocki · 1790786701 · focus · HN ↗
    Here’s a great talk to get you up to speed! <a href="https://youtu.be/y1MCLZm8yAY" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/y1MCLZm8yAY
    ghosty141 · 1790870612 · focus · HN ↗
    Super interesting, thanks!
    mhh__ · 1790787449 · focus · HN ↗
    It's not very responsive
    Scubabear68 · 1790788743 · focus · HN ↗
    From memory when I worked there 10 years ago, all the Javascript based stuff was pretty slow in a very noticeable way. They've likely gotten better as they are using a well known Javascript and rendering engine, so they're getting many optimizations for free.
    ascorbic · 1790793918 · focus · HN ↗
    They're very involved in web standards. Rob Palmer from Bloomberg is co-chair of TC39.
    apaprocki · 1790802058 · focus · HN ↗
    We’re in the middle of TC39 plenary in Tokyo right now as a matter of fact! Rob regularly posts on X as things advance through the staging process, and today is the final day.
    Agenda: <a href="https://github.com/tc39/agendas/blob/main/2026/09.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/tc39/agendas/blob/main/2026/09.md
2. alightsoul · 1790788419 · focus · HN ↗
  It used to be built with qt, now I'm guessing the answer is vanilla JS and CSS. You'd be surprised how fast they are without frameworks like react
  1. apaprocki · 1790788552 · focus · HN ↗
    It has never used qt in any way.
3. [deleted] · 1790803304 · focus · HN ↗
  [deleted]

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