Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 0/4] Makefile/coccicheck: fix bugs and speed it up

From: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 06 Mar 2021 18:52:49 +0100

On Sat, Mar 06 2021, René Scharfe. wrote:

> Am 06.03.21 um 18:27 schrieb Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason:
>> Do these sorts of rules really benefit that much from the type
>> v.s. expression? If yes we'll obviously need to support it, but if (and
>> I haven't looked closely) we can equally rewrite them with "expression"
>> (or it would be good enough) we could be quite a bit faster by
>> default...
>
> Type information is essential for many (most?) semantic patches.
> Untyped replacements could be done more easily using sed or similar.

We have 65 individual hunks in *.cocci by my count $((/ (cat *.cocci |
grep -c ^@@) 2)), but only 9 of those use the "type T" construct, which
AFAICT is the only thing affected.

There's still plenty of reason to use spatch without headers being
included, it's still doing a full parse and knows that something's a
function, and otherwise cares about C syntax etc.

Anyway, I'm not saying you don't need it, just that AFAICT it's a small
minority of the rules that require the includes.