Automating Evolution and Bug Fixing using Coccinelle

Beskrivelse

Libraries ease software development, in that they can encapsulate complex, commonly used functionalities. Nevertheless, when library APIs evolve substantial maintenance may be required to bring library clients up to date with the evolutions. Furthermore, library APIs may not be completely understood by programmers, leading to bugs that may appear at most usage sites across a system. To address these problems, there is a need for an approach to easily find and update instances of various programming idioms across a body of code.

At the University of Copenhagen and the Ecole des Mines de Nantes (France), we have been developing such a system, named Coccinelle. Coccinelle has been extensively applied to recent versions of the Linux kernel, to update code in response to API evolutions and to find and fix bugs. A unique feature of Coccinelle is that transformations are specified using a variant of the patch notation, and thus follow very closely the source code. In this talk, we will briefly present Coccinelle and illustrate its features using a few examples drawn from our work on Linux code.