Trade Matching Engine

A lightweight C++ trade matching engine built to simulate core exchange functionality such as order placement, matching, and order book management.
Implements price-time priority and supports both market and limit orders.

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Features

• Order Book Management: Efficient insertion and prioritization of buy/sell orders.
• Matching Engine Core: Matches orders using a price-time priority model.
• Randomized Market Simulation: Generates and processes hundreds of synthetic orders.
• Unit Testing Suite: Automated Catch2 tests for Order, OrderBook, and MatchingEngine.

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🧱 Project Structure

trade-matching/
├── CMakeLists.txt           # Build configuration
├── engine/                  # Core logic
│   ├── MatchingEngine.cpp/.hpp
│   ├── OrderBook.cpp/.hpp
│   ├── models/              # Data models (Order, Trade)
│   └── network/             # Placeholder for future server layer
├── src/
│   └── main.cpp             # Entry point / market simulation
├── tests/                   # Unit tests (Catch2)
│   ├── test_order.cpp
│   ├── test_orderbook.cpp
│   ├── test_engine.cpp
│   └── ...
└── build/                   # Generated build artifacts (not tracked by Git)

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Build Instructions

Prerequisites

• CMake ≥ 3.14
• C++17-compatible compiler (e.g., clang++, g++, MSVC)

Build

From the project root:

rm -rf build
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make

This will build both:

• main — the market simulation executable
• runTests — the Catch2 unit test suite

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Run Unit Tests

via CTest (recommended)

ctest --output-on-failure

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Run the Market Simulation

After building:

./main

This runs src/main.cpp, which:

1. Generates 200 random buy/sell orders for ticker AAPL.
2. Submits them to the MatchingEngine.
3. Prints the final order book snapshot.

Technical Notes

• Order Matching: Uses std::priority_queue with custom comparators to enforce correct price-time ordering.
• Randomized Input: Market orders and limit orders are generated using C++ <random> utilities.
• Thread-Safe Design (Future Work): Planned expansion to multithreaded order submission and socket-based networking layer.