Formatting a 25M-line codebase overnight

(stripe.dev)

41 points | by r00k an hour ago ago

16 comments

  • burnte 5 minutes 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.

  • varun_ch 43 minutes 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 34 minutes ago

      Right, where is the rest of the code?

    • mr_mitm 28 minutes ago

      They're up to 42 million now, as per the article

      • lukan 10 minutes 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.

  • hokkos 9 minutes ago

    Now it makes me wonder, are those 45M LoC are untyped ?

  • andrewstuart an hour ago

    A major financial processing company writes it money handling systems in Ruby.

    Terrifying.

    • mbStavola an hour ago

      Considering that it's been doing so successfully at volume for just over 15 years, I think their language choice was fine.

    • sixo 11 minutes ago

      This ought to change your mind about Ruby!

    • sunrunner 9 minutes ago

      Things can always be worse. It could be PHP, for example.

    • skinfaxi an hour ago

      Why is that terrifying?

      • Jtsummers 35 minutes ago

        It's not particularly terrifying. Some people really just don't like Ruby.

    • sikozu an hour ago

      The systems have to be written in some kind of programming language, and I think Ruby is a perfectly fine choice.

      • Imustaskforhelp 18 minutes 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.

    • semiquaver 20 minutes ago

      I’d hardly call Sorbet Ruby :)