Program Manipulation of C Code
summary
A toolchain for scripted source transformations targets large C bases with Coccinelle using its semantic patches language SmPL and metavariables plus the control‑flow .. operator to match patterns. It scales to the Linux tree (about 19 million LOC), produces predictable automated edits (over 8,500 commits), and handles real migrations such as removing an unused argument in 11 files, dropping a redundant field in 54 files, and refactoring interrupt handlers across ~200 files.
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chapters (9)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:23Julia Lawall keynote intro
- 2:07Partial evaluation to semantic patches
- 23:36Coccinelle code transformations
- 27:28Coccinelle for Linux kernel
- 35:15Coccinelle design dimensions
- 47:53Coccinelle impact in Linux
- 53:11Conclusion and future directions
- 53:52Q&A
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