"Is it worth upgrading to Amibroker 7.0?"
By Dave Mabe
Several traders have asked me about Amibroker 7.0 and whether it's worth upgrading to it.
The reliability of Amibroker over the years has been excellent, and I love the emphasis on backwards compatibility.
So normally, I'd say upgrading is worth it, but not an immediate priority.
But there is a specific function in Amibroker 7.0 that makes real-time trading much easier.
It's called fappend.
In previous versions, you could append to a local file from Amibroker without much trouble.
But the explorations are multi-threaded, which means every once in a while, your exploration will break when two threads try to append to a local file at the same time.
This is relatively rare, but your real-time trading gets interrupted when it happens, so it's a big deal.
Before 7.0, there was a workaround for this to make the file appending thread-safe, but it required some ugly code to get it to work.
With 7.0, the new fappend function is thread-safe and built-in. No more ugly workarounds.
When I saw this in the Release Notes, I knew this one lowly function would make any hassle of upgrading to 7.0 worth it.
-Dave
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