# Coccinelle

7 Hacker News commenters recommended Coccinelle and 0 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 3 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Lets you write C source changes that apply across many kernel versions, with behaviour people find easy to follow. Its documentation is often called hard to understand.

## Why people recommend it

- Valuable AST-based tooling for C (2 comments): "between cbmc, frama-c and coccinelle there is hardly another language with comparable tooling" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47764815)) "AST-driven tooling is very valuable" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47298834))
- Very useful, regarded as the best (2 comments): "it’s also very useful to do patches that work universally across kernels no matter how badly modified the sources are" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47112318)) "definitely the best and the most useful" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47101591))

## What people warn about

- Documentation hard to understand (1 comments): "I find its documentation totally incomprehensible for some reason" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47101156))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [OpenRewrite](https://hackerapproved.com/p/openrewrite.md): 7 recommend
- [go fix](https://hackerapproved.com/p/go-fix.md): 7 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Coccinelle", https://hackerapproved.com/p/coccinelle/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).