Coccinelle
Tied for most recommended of 3 code transformation tools
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.
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.
7 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 7
- criticize it
- 0
- approval share
- 100%
Recommended in 3 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 7 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- Nobody criticizes itNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 3 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, not met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Valuable AST-based tooling for C
“between cbmc, frama-c and coccinelle there is hardly another language with comparable tooling”
Comment from 14 Apr 2026 in “Someone Bought 30 WordPress Plugins and Planted a Backdoor in All of Them” “AST-driven tooling is very valuable”
Comment from 8 Mar 2026 in “Beagle, a source code management system that stores AST trees” Very useful, regarded as the best
“it’s also very useful to do patches that work universally across kernels no matter how badly modified the sources are”
Comment from 22 Feb 2026 in “Coccinelle: The Linux kernel's source-to-source transformation tool” “definitely the best and the most useful”
Comment from 21 Feb 2026 in “Coccinelle: The Linux kernel's source-to-source transformation tool”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Documentation hard to understand
“I find its documentation totally incomprehensible for some reason”
Comment from 21 Feb 2026 in “Coccinelle: The Linux kernel's source-to-source transformation tool”
Other code transformation tools people recommend
The two most recommended other code transformation tools, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CoccinelleThis page | 7 | 0 | 100% | 3 | — | — |
| OpenRewrite | 7 | 1 | 88% | 3 | — | — |
| go fix | 7 | 2 | 78% | 2 | — | — |
What people said
6 of the 7 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“between cbmc, frama-c and coccinelle there is hardly another language with comparable tooling”
“AST-driven tooling is very valuable”
“it’s also very useful to do patches that work universally across kernels no matter how badly modified the sources are”
“definitely the best and the most useful”
“I find its documentation totally incomprehensible for some reason”
“where I understand exactly what it does, when it does it and why it does it”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.