Mentorship Session: Coccinelle: Automating Large-scale Evolution and Bug Finding in C Code

Coccinelle is a program transformation tool for C code. Short scripts expressed using a patch-like syntax make it possible to make changes .. Read more consistently and reliably across a C codebase. In this talk, we will see how to use existing scripts in the Linux kernel, write new scripts for some simple changes, and give an overview of more advanced concepts. The session will begin with an overview by Julia Lawall (45 minutes) and will be followed by Q&A – an opportunity to both ask Julia questions and for group discussion (45 minutes). Julia Lawall is a Senior Research Scientist at Inria. Her research is at the intersection of programming languages and operating systems. She develops the tool Coccinelle and has over 2000 patches in the Linux kernel based on this work.