Coccinelle (software)

Coccinelle

Stable release	0.2.5 / April 3, 2011; 6 months ago (2011-04-03)
Preview release	1.0.0-rc7 / August 27, 2011; 48 days ago (2011-08-27)
Development status	Active
Written in	Objective Caml, Python
Type	Static program analysis
License	GNU GPL v2
Website	coccinelle.lip6.fr

Coccinelle (French word for ladybug) is a tool to match and transform the source code of programs written in the programming language C. Coccinelle was initially used to aid the evolution of Linux; with support for changes to library application programming interfaces (APIs) such as renaming a function, adding a function argument which value is somehow context-dependent, and reorganizing a data structure. The tool is freely available under an open source license.

The source code to be matched and/or replaced is specified using a pattern that is very similar to C (the Semantic Patch Language).^[1][2]

Example

@@
expression lock, flags;
expression urb;
@@

 spin_lock_irqsave(lock, flags);
 <...
- usb_submit_urb(urb)
+ usb_submit_urb(urb, GFP_ATOMIC)
 ...>
 spin_unlock_irqrestore(lock, flags);

@@
expression urb;
@@

- usb_submit_urb(urb)
+ usb_submit_urb(urb, GFP_KERNEL)

Development

Support is provided by IRILL and funding for the development of Coccinelle has been provided by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (France), the Danish Research Council for Technology and Production Sciences and INRIA.

References

1. ^ Valerie Henson (2009-01-20). "Semantic patching with Coccinelle". Linux Weekly News. http://lwn.net/Articles/315686/. Retrieved 2011-04-25. 
2. ^ Wolfram Sang (2010-03-30). "Evolutionary development of a semantic patch using Coccinelle". Linux Weekly News. http://lwn.net/Articles/380835/. Retrieved 2011-04-25. 

External links

• Official release tracking repository at GitHub
• Articles describing the use of Coccinelle
• Coccinelle wiki