Formatting a 25M-line codebase overnight | Hacker News

Hacker News users discussed how teams roll out auto-formatters across very large repos, often starting with a full-format sweep and then updating active PRs incrementally.

The goal is to avoid massive merge conflicts and keep ongoing development moving while the codebase is reformatted.

Examples included Prettier, Dart formatter, and GitHub workflows, plus safety checks some formatters use before changing files.

The thread also underscored how hard this becomes at extreme scale, including a 25M-line codebase.