I am more shocked by the "overnight" aspect. I tried running clang-format on the Chromium source (68,281 .cc files, 21 million lines according to wc):
$ find chromium-149.0.7826.1/ -name ".cc" -exec cat {} + | wc 21640925 55715244 833460441
And that took less than 6 minutes on a single E5-2696 v3 from 2014:
$ time find chromium-149.0.7826.1/ -name *.cc | parallel -j 16 clang-format $x>/dev/null
real 0m5.666s user 1m13.964s sys 0m13.373s
That’s orders of magnitude faster, especially if we assume they’re not running their workloads on potatoes like mine. Is Ruby’s syntax really that much more complicated than C++, or is this a tooling problem?
My guess would be tooling. I think the Ruby formatters are written in Ruby. I’d guess the clang one is written in C.
I don't think the post necessarily means it took multiple hours to format the codebase, I think they're probably just saying they worked on it off-hours and landed it while no one was working so that it didn't run into merge conflicts.