Coccinelle is a program matching and transformation engine which
provides the language SmPL (Semantic Patch Language) for specifying
desired matches and transformations in C code. Coccinelle was
initially targeted towards performing collateral evolutions in Linux. Such
evolutions comprise the changes that are needed in client code in
response to evolutions in library APIs, and may include modifications
such as renaming a function, adding a function argument whose value is
somehow context-dependent, and reorganizing a data structure. Beyond
collateral evolutions, Coccinelle is successfully used (by us and
others) for finding and fixing bugs in systems code.
Sponsors
The development of Coccinelle has been supported in the past by the Agence
Nationale de la Recherche (France) under the contracts ANR-09-BLAN-0158-01
and ANR-05-BLAN-0383, the Danish Research Council for Technology and
Production Sciences, and INRIA via the cooperative research initiative ARC VeriTLA+.
News
Coccinelle semantic patches are available in the "scripts" directory of
Linux.
We would like to thank the Linux
Foundation, Collabora, and Google Summer of Code for
supporting internships that has helped to improve Coccinelle and the
associated infrastructure.
