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Formatting a 25M-line codebase overnight

https://stripe.dev/blog/formatting-an-entire-25-million-line-codebase-overnight-the-rubyfmt-story
47•r00k•1h ago

Comments

andrewstuart•1h ago
A major financial processing company writes it money handling systems in Ruby.

Terrifying.

skinfaxi•1h ago
Why is that terrifying?
Jtsummers•1h ago
It's not particularly terrifying. Some people really just don't like Ruby.
mikedelago•21m ago
Some folks don't like shipping
fantasizr•8m ago
ive yet to see a compelling elitist programming language opinion. especially when used at big successful companies. these companies don't function in spite of their technology choices.
sikozu•1h ago
The systems have to be written in some kind of programming language, and I think Ruby is a perfectly fine choice.
Imustaskforhelp•44m ago
Not denying that Ruby is a perfectly fine choice but within the article itself it says that Stripe runs the world's largest Ruby codebase so certainly it might be testing the constraints of the language.

The thing I am interested is that I don't suppose that Stripe always had these many LOC's and so I would be curious to know if at any point as the codebase was increasing, were they looking at other new languages which were coming like golang or rust which was more suited for their work or not and what were there decisions/thinking process to continue using ruby.

mbStavola•1h ago
Considering that it's been doing so successfully at volume for just over 15 years, I think their language choice was fine.
semiquaver•45m ago
I’d hardly call Sorbet Ruby :)
sixo•37m ago
This ought to change your mind about Ruby!
sunrunner•34m ago
Things can always be worse. It could be PHP, for example.
burnte•17m ago
Facebook runs in it, so I think the language itself is probably a fine choice.
varun_ch•1h ago
I’m shocked at the 25M line part! That is a completely unfathomable amount of code for one codebase. I really want to know more about that.
jsnell•1h ago
Right, where is the rest of the code?
mr_mitm•54m ago
They're up to 42 million now, as per the article
lukan•35m ago
That sounds even more insane to me, but I guess most of that code does not really touch financial transactions, otherwise it would be a nightmare being responsible to verify that.
bruckie•21m ago
Only 25 million? :) Google had billions a decade ago...

https://research.google/pubs/why-google-stores-billions-of-l...

hokkos•34m ago
Now it makes me wonder, are those 45M LoC are untyped ?
m12k•31m ago
https://brandur.org/nanoglyphs/015-ruby-typing#ruby-typing
c3ab8ff137•18m ago
No, Stripe has its own Ruby typechecker - https://sorbet.org/
burnte•30m ago
The floating spiral thing is so distracting I spent more time deleting it in Inspector than reading the article. I feel like they hate their readers. Awful.
CrzyLngPwd•24m ago
One of my first jobs was a small software company writing software for a small number of clients, in MS basic PDS.

The lead developer didn't like to bother with formatting code, so I wrote a tool called makenice to format his nasty spaghetti gibberish into something with good indents and layout to make it easier for us normal people to parse.

He was furious, literally spun in circles about it right in the office in front of everyone, so I wrote makenasty to format code into the way he appeared to like.

I only shared makenasty/nice with a couple of the team, who loved it, as it allowed easy conversion between something readable and something the team lead like.

He never knew about makenasty.

CrzyLngPwd•20m ago
Surely, it no longer needs to be human-readable, and the era of write-only code is finally upon us with the dawn of AI writing our mealtickets.

Why bother formatting 25m lines of slop, and why is AI wasting tokens on making code look human-readable anyway?

hobofan•10m ago
I'm surprised they went with a all-at-once reformat. Even when doing it over a weekend this is bound to mess with a lot of open PRs at their scale.

I had to introduce a formatter in a few sizeable codebases in the past (few 100k to few million LOC), and I always did it incrementally via a script that reformatted all files that are not touched in any open PR. The initial run reformatted 95% of all files. Then I ran the script every day for ~two weeks and got up to 99.5% of all files and then manually each time one of the remaining ~dozen PRs that were WIP for longer were merged.

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