Coccinelle, Prequel, and Spinfer: Code Evolutions in the Linux Kernel

🎉Join r2c for a virtual meetup with a very special guest presenter: Julia Lawall from Inria. 🎉

Coccinelle, Prequel, and Spinfer:
Automating Summarization and Application of Code Evolutions in the Linux Kernel

In a large software system such as the Linux kernel, there is a continual need for large-scale changes across many source files, triggered by new needs or refined design decisions. Over the past 15 years, we have developed tools:
to automate such changes (Coccinelle)
to extract information about such changes from git histories (Prequel)
to automatically infer relevant transformation rules (Spinfer)


In this talk, we will present the design of these tools and review their use and potential use in the development of the Linux kernel and other large code bases.