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Date/Time: Sun, 11 Oct 2026 05:31:56 +0000



[Sticky] [Locked] - Upcoming Development and Internal Number Precision Improvement Project

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[2025-12-12 03:13:14]
Sierra_Chart Engineering - Posts: 25128
Several things are going to be posted in this thread, and we will make these as separate posts.
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[2025-12-12 03:13:36]
Sierra_Chart Engineering - Posts: 25128
First, we want to restate what is posted, in the thread related to the MDI (Multiple Document Interface) development:

We are doing some work, related to Minimized windows, and we realize that this whole concept of minimizing a window within the larger MDI container window does not make sense.

When minimizing a window, it goes all the way down to the bottom and usually ends up getting hidden by other windows and you effectively lose it. In some cases it may not even be visible because in the case of the virtual space when enabled, the minimized window is placed all the way at the bottom of the virtual space and you have to scroll down to see it.

If other windows are overlapping the minimized window, you have to then move those out of the way. Also you have no idea what window is what among all of the minimize windows at the bottom. They are just a bunch of block rectangles.

You can only logically restore it through the CW menu by knowing which one it is and that is not entirely clear.

The whole minimize concept within the context of a multiple document interface, does not make sense.

Instead what we are going to do is as follows:

For minimize, we will support the following:

No Action (In which case, there is no minimize button)

Hide Window (you can then unhide it, from the CW menu and the hidden windows will be clearly identified)

Resize the window to a predefined width and height, that you will set, and keep the top left coordinate in place. So the size of it will be greatly reduced or reduced whatever size you preset. Keeping it in place makes sense. Rather than pushing it all away down to the bottom and having no way to even know what window is what at the bottom. They just look like a bunch of rectangular blocks. It is simply stupid.

When a window is is in a reduced resized state, the minimize button, will then act to restore it.

In the case of the the main desktop on the operating system, when you minimize a window it minimizes to the taskbar and the taskbar provides a very clear understandable view, of what window is what and you can easily restore them.

Minimizing an MDI window, is just simply makes no sense at all and we are going to remove this concept especially being there are various outstanding implementation issues with it.

Furthermore, the time and sales window which overlaps the main window and also the market depth window, need to be integrated, into chart windows. We will be adding support to integrate a time and sales into a chart. Market depth is already Integrated in various ways.

And we will add support for detachable Chartbooks, but that will take some time.

And we are going to complete the project, to support full trade window capabilities through a Control Bar. This will be a highly efficient, and customizable, trading window interface.

This will not take long to do. We should have this done, by the end of the day Friday, December 12, 2025.
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Date Time Of Last Edit: 2025-12-12 03:21:16
[2025-12-12 03:15:31]
Sierra_Chart Engineering - Posts: 25128
Next areas of development, are as follows:

Google firebase integration (a replacement for the ntfy app to receive mobile device notifications for alerts or other chat messages)

Two factor authentication for Sierra Chart login (Already in latest Prerelease 2829)

Detachable Chartbooks (this will take some time)

Control Bar based Trade Window

Possibly we may support attaching a quote board into the multiple document interface.

Integrated Time and Sales into chart window.

Removing, off price trades outside of regular trading hours for CTA and UTP data feeds (stock data). Removing these, will only happen during the nonregular trading hours. No changes during regular trading hours but there is not a problem there anyway. We will have to analyze exactly the particular sale conditions for these off-price trades.

Internal precision improvement described in the next post.
Sierra Chart Support - Engineering Level

Your definitive source for support. Other responses are from users. Try to keep your questions brief and to the point. Be aware of support policy:
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For the most reliable, advanced, and zero cost futures order routing, use the Teton service:
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Date Time Of Last Edit: 2025-12-12 03:22:16
[2025-12-12 03:20:32]
Sierra_Chart Engineering - Posts: 25128
Another major long-overdue task, that we must do, is that Sierra Chart must support fractional volume/trade/size values.

For example US stock market data, from NASDAQ will begin to trade in fractional quantities in February 2026.

This is already supported for Market depth data, and it is supported for Trading quantities but it is not supported, for market data volumes for trades.

This is also necessary for crypto currency exchanges.

We have to go from an integer to a double precision floating point value.

This is extensive work which will take 1-2 months.

The Intraday data file format will also be adapted to support this.

Another critical thing related to the above, is that the internal storage of data within charts needs to go from 4 byte floats to 8 byte double precision floats.

This will also improve accuracy with studies.

All of the above, will cause incompatibility with ACSIL studies and they will need to be recompiled. This will just be a recompile but inevitably there will be warnings that the compiler will generate. Like for example if you are assigning a value from a Subgraph Data array into a four byte float, then there will be a warning about loss of precision. This can be ignored.

Generated DLLs will probably have this new suffix appended after these changes _64D rather than _64. D means double.

These changes will increase the memory use of Sierra Chart. The increase would be estimated to be about 80 to 90% more. We would recommend, that a system is equipped with a minimum of 32 GB . This is far more than anything Sierra Chart would ever need, but we just recommend having this amount of memory in a computer system at a minimum. We are thinking in terms of a desktop system. Or a server.

We do not believe there will be any performance degradation with the above changes.

And once these changes are deployed, it will break compatibility with existing DLLs and they will need to be recompiled and we are not going to be supporting in the current versions, two different interfaces for ACSIL or different versions. Newer versions will simply support the single interface which is updated to use double values.
Sierra Chart Support - Engineering Level

Your definitive source for support. Other responses are from users. Try to keep your questions brief and to the point. Be aware of support policy:
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Date Time Of Last Edit: 2025-12-12 03:56:16
[2025-12-12 03:24:22]
Sierra_Chart Engineering - Posts: 25128
All of the above in this thread, will move Sierra Chart into a much much better class of program which will make it untouchable by any other competition when it comes to features, and capabilities and precision and being everything is developed from scratch. And that we are certain of. It is already good but it is going to be much better.

We will then be able to adopt other crypto currency exchanges. We will add support for many more without difficulty.
Sierra Chart Support - Engineering Level

Your definitive source for support. Other responses are from users. Try to keep your questions brief and to the point. Be aware of support policy:
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For the most reliable, advanced, and zero cost futures order routing, use the Teton service:
Sierra Chart Teton Futures Order Routing
Date Time Of Last Edit: 2025-12-12 03:25:21
[2025-12-31 03:36:39]
Sierra_Chart Engineering - Posts: 25128
One user asked for a feature in the Volume by Price study to support the average trade quantity. This is partially implemented. It was not possible to implement, the volume bar portion of this, without the above changes. So this feature will be fully implemented with the above changes.
Sierra Chart Support - Engineering Level

Your definitive source for support. Other responses are from users. Try to keep your questions brief and to the point. Be aware of support policy:
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For the most reliable, advanced, and zero cost futures order routing, use the Teton service:
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[2026-01-09 20:32:34]
Sierra_Chart Engineering - Posts: 25128
We are going to remove this thread from the top of the message board.

This is not going to be the case anymore after further consideration:

All of the above, will cause incompatibility with ACSIL studies and they will need to be recompiled. This will just be a recompile but inevitably there will be warnings that the compiler will generate. Like for example if you are assigning a value from a Subgraph Data array into a four byte float, then there will be a warning about loss of precision. This can be ignored.

Generated DLLs will probably have this new suffix appended after these changes _64D rather than _64. D means double.
There will not be breaking of compatibility in general with custom studies. Instead there will be small changes with the interface. For example, studies that use the Volume at Price data will need to be recompiled. The studies will still be loaded and called, but they just will get an empty Volume at Price container until they are recompiled for newer versions.
Sierra Chart Support - Engineering Level

Your definitive source for support. Other responses are from users. Try to keep your questions brief and to the point. Be aware of support policy:
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For the most reliable, advanced, and zero cost futures order routing, use the Teton service:
Sierra Chart Teton Futures Order Routing
[2026-03-17 15:10:21]
Sierra_Chart Engineering - Posts: 25128
We are moving this back up to the top of the Support Board.

We have done some testing and as expected, there is no difference in calculation time between 8 byte doubles and 4 byte floats. However, when there is a larger amount of memory allocated for a chart due to a large number of chart bars, there is an increase in calculation time due to more memory being accessed. So using doubles will in some cases cause longer calculation times due to memory access.

Using doubles is much more accurate with calculations.
Sierra Chart Support - Engineering Level

Your definitive source for support. Other responses are from users. Try to keep your questions brief and to the point. Be aware of support policy:
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For the most reliable, advanced, and zero cost futures order routing, use the Teton service:
Sierra Chart Teton Futures Order Routing
Date Time Of Last Edit: 2026-03-17 15:10:34
[2026-03-27 05:40:16]
Sierra_Chart Engineering - Posts: 25128
We are gradually starting working on updating price and quantity values to doubles.

Chart data arrays will still remain as floats for the time being.

In version 2894, the Time and Sales array is going to be changed and ACSIL custom DLL studies that use Time and Sales data will need to be recompiled. Otherwise, they will just get an empty Time and Sales array.
Sierra Chart Support - Engineering Level

Your definitive source for support. Other responses are from users. Try to keep your questions brief and to the point. Be aware of support policy:
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For the most reliable, advanced, and zero cost futures order routing, use the Teton service:
Sierra Chart Teton Futures Order Routing
Date Time Of Last Edit: 2026-03-27 05:41:27
[2026-04-20 02:20:42]
Sierra_Chart Engineering - Posts: 25128
For support for fractional/floating-point values for volumes in Intraday data, we are now working towards a new Intraday data file format which has its own built-in compression (ZLib).

Even though, the types are larger (8 bytes versus 4 bytes for prices and volumes), we expect that the size of these files will be smaller than the existing files and will not rely on operating system compression.

All values including price and volume values will be double precision floating point types (8 bytes).

Where necessary, the DTC protocol messages are also being updated to double types from float where floats are being used for prices or volumes.

Sierra Chart already has support for double precision fractional trading order quantities for many years now. This has been in existence about eight years.
Sierra Chart Support - Engineering Level

Your definitive source for support. Other responses are from users. Try to keep your questions brief and to the point. Be aware of support policy:
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For the most reliable, advanced, and zero cost futures order routing, use the Teton service:
Sierra Chart Teton Futures Order Routing
Date Time Of Last Edit: 2026-04-20 12:49:53
[2026-04-20 12:51:28]
Sierra_Chart Engineering - Posts: 25128

Google firebase integration (a replacement for the ntfy app to receive mobile device notifications for alerts or other chat messages)
This is done and we will put out documentation shortly.

We have a new version of the web chat, to easily see all of your alert messages in a single table:
https://apps.sierrachart.com/WebChat/#!/notifications (This last part is still part of the link)

Integrated Time and Sales into chart window.
We expect to get started on this in about a month or so.
Sierra Chart Support - Engineering Level

Your definitive source for support. Other responses are from users. Try to keep your questions brief and to the point. Be aware of support policy:
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For the most reliable, advanced, and zero cost futures order routing, use the Teton service:
Sierra Chart Teton Futures Order Routing
Date Time Of Last Edit: 2026-04-20 12:54:15
[2026-05-14 22:30:57]
Sierra_Chart Engineering - Posts: 25128
Related to this development the next change we are going to make which will affect ACSIL custom studies is to this market depth data structure:
struct s_MarketDepthEntry
{
  double Price = 0;
  t_MarketDataQuantity Quantity = 0;
  uint32_t NumOrders = 0;
  double AdjustedPrice = 0;
}

The Price members will be changed from float to double.

This will require a recompile of custom studies when this is released. Otherwise, the functions to access market depth data, will just returned an error: 0.


Also regarding Google Firebase development, that was abandoned. This ended up being a lot of work and in the end, it offered no advantage over the ntfy app. The ntfy app overall is more reliable for various reasons.
Sierra Chart Support - Engineering Level

Your definitive source for support. Other responses are from users. Try to keep your questions brief and to the point. Be aware of support policy:
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For the most reliable, advanced, and zero cost futures order routing, use the Teton service:
Sierra Chart Teton Futures Order Routing
Date Time Of Last Edit: 2026-05-14 22:32:43
[2026-05-29 16:36:10]
Sierra_Chart Engineering - Posts: 25128
We are gradually working on changing chart data arrays and price variables from float to double precision types but we are doing it in a way that is not going to cause any impact until we are complete. And in a way where we can easily change this back to float.

In the next release we are introducing this new type:
typedef float t_ChartArrayDataType;

Everywhere float is specified for chart data arrays and associated variables, we will use this type. It is currently a float, but we can then change it to a double easily.

So we recommend updating ACSIL code where you currently use float and change it to t_ChartArrayDataType, when compiling on version 2914 and higher.


Most likely we will go to double from float for chart data arrays because it does make Sierra Chart study calculations more precise, and the storage of prices is 100% correct like in the case of US bond prices. And also price values are represented more precisely.
Sierra Chart Support - Engineering Level

Your definitive source for support. Other responses are from users. Try to keep your questions brief and to the point. Be aware of support policy:
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For the most reliable, advanced, and zero cost futures order routing, use the Teton service:
Sierra Chart Teton Futures Order Routing
Date Time Of Last Edit: 2026-05-30 09:33:36
[2026-09-12 22:00:15]
Sierra_Chart Engineering - Posts: 25128
It is 100% definite, that the main chart data arrays will be changed to the double data type. This is a huge improvement throughout Sierra Chart this change and related changes. There are many related other variables where 4 byte Float types have been used and now they are double type.

These changes are absolutely critical for precision, and consistency and eliminating various problems related to floating-point error and imprecision.

We intend to be releasing this change possibly the weekend of September 26, 2026.

At that time custom studies will need to be recompiled, if and only if, you are running that version or higher, that is released at that time.
Sierra Chart Support - Engineering Level

Your definitive source for support. Other responses are from users. Try to keep your questions brief and to the point. Be aware of support policy:
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For the most reliable, advanced, and zero cost futures order routing, use the Teton service:
Sierra Chart Teton Futures Order Routing
Date Time Of Last Edit: 2026-09-23 23:19:57
[2026-09-23 23:21:43]
Sierra_Chart Engineering - Posts: 25128
Regarding the change to double precision values for chart data arrays, this will not be released on September 26, 2026. We will see if we can release it on October 3, 2026 but it is not yet definite.

However, this evening, we will release a version that supports the double precision values that you can install, and we will tell you what version that is. It will not be one that is automatically installed. It will be a specific version number you need to specify through the Sierra Chart File Downloader. So users can begin to do testing.

This is not the final version with the changes, and studies compiled with this version will still need to be re-compiled, in the final version, that supports double precision values for chart data arrays. This is more like a preview.

What we are most interested in learning is any detrimental performance impacts. Generally there should not be any negative performance impacts but if the charts contain a very large number of chart bars, which is not the usual case, there could be due to more memory being accessed.
Sierra Chart Support - Engineering Level

Your definitive source for support. Other responses are from users. Try to keep your questions brief and to the point. Be aware of support policy:
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For the most reliable, advanced, and zero cost futures order routing, use the Teton service:
Sierra Chart Teton Futures Order Routing
Date Time Of Last Edit: 2026-09-24 13:15:05
[2026-09-24 13:14:30]
Sierra_Chart Engineering - Posts: 25128
Letting everyone know we have not done the preview release yet described in the prior post.

Will be coming out we expect within an hour.
Sierra Chart Support - Engineering Level

Your definitive source for support. Other responses are from users. Try to keep your questions brief and to the point. Be aware of support policy:
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For the most reliable, advanced, and zero cost futures order routing, use the Teton service:
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[2026-09-25 01:09:47]
Sierra_Chart Engineering - Posts: 25128
Version 2958 has been released. This version supports 8 byte double precision values for chart data arrays.

To install this version, follow the instructions here:
Software Download: Full Control Rollback Procedure

These instructions explain how to install a particular version.

Existing custom studies, must be recompiled with this version. They are not prevented from running and will cause exceptions and instability. You may want to run Sierra Chart in safe mode when using this version:
Sierra Chart - Software Login Instructions: Using Safe Mode

And then rebuild the custom studies you have before disabling Safe Mode.
Sierra Chart Support - Engineering Level

Your definitive source for support. Other responses are from users. Try to keep your questions brief and to the point. Be aware of support policy:
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For the most reliable, advanced, and zero cost futures order routing, use the Teton service:
Sierra Chart Teton Futures Order Routing
Date Time Of Last Edit: 2026-09-25 01:40:01
[2026-09-27 02:56:12]
Sierra_Chart Engineering - Posts: 25128
What we decided to do is to release as a prerelease, the change, where chart data arrays are double precision floating-point 8 byte values. There are other places, which are changed to double precision values as well, and also some integer types, which are changed to double precision floating point values.

This is version 2960.

It is too difficult to be maintaining two different build states. This is why we are going to release this as a pre-release today.

The changes are not yet finalized and as you rebuild studies on this version, expect some changes this week and possibly next week. And custom studies will require rebuilding as new versions are released, but these will always be prerelease versions.

The main additional change that needs to be completed, is to this structure:
s_SCNewOrder


It is being significantly reorganized and Attached Orders will be made as an array. The same way they are held within the main program.

The old version of the s_SCNewOrder structure will still be supported under the same name. So no code changes are needed but it would be recommended to go to the new structure when available later this week.

If you are not using any custom studies and just using built-in studies, it is fine to update to this prerelease. You will not have any issues.
Sierra Chart Support - Engineering Level

Your definitive source for support. Other responses are from users. Try to keep your questions brief and to the point. Be aware of support policy:
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For the most reliable, advanced, and zero cost futures order routing, use the Teton service:
Sierra Chart Teton Futures Order Routing
Date Time Of Last Edit: 2026-09-27 17:29:55
[2026-10-01 03:19:18]
Sierra_Chart Engineering - Posts: 25128
We had released version 2961 this evening but we removed it. It was a pre-release. There is a problem related to writing intraday files. It relates to the new development to support the new Intraday file format.

It is not directly related to all the other development, with the internal number precision improvement. It is a separate issue. We are going to get that resolved as soon as possible.
Sierra Chart Support - Engineering Level

Your definitive source for support. Other responses are from users. Try to keep your questions brief and to the point. Be aware of support policy:
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For the most reliable, advanced, and zero cost futures order routing, use the Teton service:
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[2026-10-02 05:53:09]
Sierra_Chart Engineering - Posts: 25128
Version 2962 has now been released. Here are the version/release notes for it:
https://www.sierrachart.com/index.php?page=doc/Whats_New.php#SCVer2962

There is a good possibility, that there are no further breaking changes but we do not know for sure. We expect this to be finalized, over the next two weeks.
Sierra Chart Support - Engineering Level

Your definitive source for support. Other responses are from users. Try to keep your questions brief and to the point. Be aware of support policy:
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For the most reliable, advanced, and zero cost futures order routing, use the Teton service:
Sierra Chart Teton Futures Order Routing
Date Time Of Last Edit: 2026-10-02 05:53:52
[2026-10-02 06:03:56]
Sierra_Chart Engineering - Posts: 25128
We forgot to do some version number updates, in the main SierraChart.h header. We are releasing version 2963.
Sierra Chart Support - Engineering Level

Your definitive source for support. Other responses are from users. Try to keep your questions brief and to the point. Be aware of support policy:
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For the most reliable, advanced, and zero cost futures order routing, use the Teton service:
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[2026-10-07 04:22:19]
Sierra_Chart Engineering - Posts: 25128
We have released version 2965.

And we are going to be releasing 2966 overnight. We have reorganized the s_UseTool data structure. And increased the number of Levels for drawing tools that require Levels, to 64.

We are not yet done With ACSIL changes. We expect to be all done in version 2967 and then that will become the main release we would expect.

One quick note, we enabled OpenGL support for the ARM64 build and we want to know if OpenGL can now be used on ARM64 and if there any problems? This was actually done some versions earlier.
Sierra Chart Support - Engineering Level

Your definitive source for support. Other responses are from users. Try to keep your questions brief and to the point. Be aware of support policy:
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For the most reliable, advanced, and zero cost futures order routing, use the Teton service:
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Date Time Of Last Edit: 2026-10-07 04:27:23
[2026-10-07 19:28:49]
Sierra_Chart Engineering - Posts: 25128
Version 2966 has been released, with an updated s_UseTool data structure. It is better organized, and supports 64 drawing levels for like the retracement type drawings.

The only other change that we plan to make to ACSIL is to this class:
c_ACSILDepthBars

Quantity values will be updated to doubles.

This change should be out tomorrow.
Sierra Chart Support - Engineering Level

Your definitive source for support. Other responses are from users. Try to keep your questions brief and to the point. Be aware of support policy:
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For the most reliable, advanced, and zero cost futures order routing, use the Teton service:
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Date Time Of Last Edit: 2026-10-07 19:29:02

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