Developer Guide

Guidance on developing and extending NautilusTrader, or contributing back to the project.

NautilusTrader uses a Rust core with Python bindings architecture:

• Rust handles networking, data parsing, order matching, and other performance-critical operations.
• Python provides the user-facing API for strategy development, configuration, and system integration.
• PyO3 bridges the two, exposing Rust functionality to Python with minimal overhead.

This approach combines Python's simplicity and ecosystem with Rust's performance and memory safety.

Contents

• Environment Setup
• Design Principles
• Coding Standards
• Rust
• Python
• Testing
• Test Datasets
• Docs Style
• Release Notes
• Adapters
• Data Testing Spec
• Execution Testing Spec
• Benchmarking
• FFI Memory Contract