I've heard that Google works [sort of] that way (don't know, myself). They have a lot of tools that allow devs to use what formatting they want, and it's made standard, during checkin.

I heard this, many years ago, when we used Perforce. The Perforce consultant that we dealt with, told us this, as an example of triggers. Back then, I was told that Google was a big Perforce shop (maybe just a part of Google. I dunno).

I have heard that this was one of the goals of developing IDLs. I think the vision was, that you could have a dozen different programmers, working in multiple languages (for example, C for the drivers, Haskell for the engine, and Lua for the UI). They would be converted to a common IDL, when submitted to configuration management, and then extracted from that, when the user looks at it.

I can't see that working, but a lot of stuff that I used to think was crazy, has happened, so, who knows?

I can confirm that Google was using Perforce for version control extensively, at least through 2008. I think it was somehow customized, but I definitely have lingering muscle memory around “p4 sync” and “p4 submit”.

I was on an internal tools team doing distinctly unsexy LAMP-stack work, but all the documentation I ever saw talked about perforce/p4.

Go was designed at Google with a built in style checker to explicitly address this and prevent bikeshedding.