PEpestkranker·Aug 23, 2017Submission
Codemod – A library to assist with large-scale codebase refactoring
42 points · Open discussionfacebookarchive
codemod
Python2011–2025
facebookarchive / codemod · Archived
codemod
Codemod is a tool/library to assist you with large-scale codebase refactors that can be partially automated but still require human oversight and occasional intervention. Codemod was developed at Facebook and released as open source.
16Distinct people
18Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
4.1KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Codemod is a tool/library to assist you with large-scale codebase refactors that can be partially automated but still require human oversight and occasional intervention. Codemod was developed at Facebook and released as open source.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
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Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 7:56:55 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year18 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2011-05-21 19:46:39 UTC to 2025-10-08 11:36:25 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2011 | 2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2012 | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 0 | 5 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
2 sourcesA good chunk of that is that Go, by design, makes nearly all changes breaking (as you covered pretty well). I doubt they did so intentionally, but they seem to focus their decisions on small-ish scale projects at the expense of large / longer-term ones, and this is the natural consequence.
I think the focus here makes sense, and improves lots of useful things in practice (which is why they do it - Go focuses on pragmatism), I just don't really like it. Every non-side-project I've worked on has chafed under weaknesses that Go seems to embrace, because the code has had to survive and grow for a couple years. It's a sizable step up from Python tho.
As far as ways out of this mess... not sure. A lot of the problems are solved by "hit it until it compiles", which is a good thing, and often implies automated code-rewriting tools are possibl
Read the rest
e. The rest (adding methods -> you may collide with an interface which you didn't before) can probably be detected so you at least have your potential-problems enumerated. There are some fairly sophisticated tools out there for doing both of these, e.g. https://github.com/facebook/codemod , and it'd be great to see more language-communities embrace (and improve) them IMO.
If you manage to limit most of your changes to "can be automatically changed / detected", you have a fair bit more freedom. With Go's limitations... maybe enough? I'd have to read and think a lot harder to figure out if there would be too many things that fall into those gaps.