GNU poke 4.0 released

[Jose E. Marchesi]

I am happy to announce a new major release of GNU poke, version 4.0.

This release is the result of a year of development.  A lot of things
have changed and improved with respect to the 3.x series; we have
fixed many bugs and added quite a lot of new exciting and useful
features.  See below for a description of many of them.

The tarball poke-4.0.tar.gz is now available at
https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/poke/poke-4.0.tar.gz.

  GNU poke (http://www.jemarch.net/poke) is an interactive, extensible
  editor for binary data.  Not limited to editing basic entities such
  as bits and bytes, it provides a full-fledged procedural,
  interactive programming language designed to describe data
  structures and to operate on them.

Thanks to the people who contributed with code and/or documentation to
this release.

Once again, our special thanks to Bruno Haible for his invaluable
advise and his help in throughfully testing this new release in many
different platforms and configurations.

What is new in this release:

User interface updates
======================

  - The `dump' command now accepts an argument :val.  This argument is
    a mapped value, and makes `dump' to dump the bytes corresponding
    to the value, using colors for the different fields.  This command
    is useful in order to get a visual representation of the
    constituents of the value and their corresponding bytes.

  - It is now possible to compare Poke values of type `any' using the
    equality and inequality operators == and !=.

  - GNU poke now acknowledges the POKE_LOAD_PATH environment variable
    whose value, if defined, gets prepended to the load_path when poke
    starts.

  - When the poke compiler finds an error in an inline asm template it
    now emits a proper parse error.

  - The poked program now recognizes the -S command line option
    properly.

  - The poked program now uses a socket in /tmp/poked-UID.pic where
    UID is the user ID of the effective user running the program.
    This is better than the previous behavior of always using
    /tmp/poked.ipc, since it allows for several poked instances to be
    run in the system.

  - The poke program now allows referring to IO spaces by name/handler
    with $<STR>, where STR is a non-ambiguous substring of some open
    IO space handler.  Examples are $</bin/ls> and $<*0*>, which could
    be referred to as $<ls> and $<0> respectively.

  - A new utility called pokefmt has been added to the GNU poke
    distribution, which implements a simple template system.  See the
    manual for details on how to use this utility.

  - The poke prompt can now be customized by the user.  This is done
    by re-defining a function called pk_prompt.  The default value for
    this function just returns "(poke)", but it can be made as complex
    as desired.

  - The poke prompt can now be styled using the `prompt' styling
    class.

  - The new dot-command `.compiler ast EXPR' will compile EXPR and
    then print its abstract syntax tree (AST).  This is useful for
    debugging the compiler.

  - The dot-command `.info type' now accepts both expressions or Poke
    type specifiers as argument.  In the first case it prints
    information about the type of the value to which the expression
    evaluates.  In the second case it prints information about the
    type denoted by the given specifier.

  - The dot-command `.info type' no longer shows field pretty-printer
    methods, nor anonymous fields in the list of methods and fields.

  - A dot-command `.mmap FILENAME, BASE, SIZE' is now available to
    poke at devices and files that require mmap.  This is the case of
    many devices provided by kernel drivers.

Poke Language updates
=====================

  - The Poke language now supports using the `t' and `T' suffixes to
    denote the uint<1> (bit) values 0t and 1t.

  - It is now possible to specify pretty-printers for particular
    fields in struct type definitions, rather than having to
    pretty-print the whole value.  To pretty-print a field FNAME, just
    define the pretty-printer as a method called _print_FNAME.

  - A new immutable variable pk_version is made available, that
    contains a string with the version of the running poke.

  - A new struct type Pk_Version is defined, that denotes the version
    of a GNU poke system, or of a pickle.  Accompanying functions
    pk_version_parse and pk_vercmp are available for parsing
    PK_Version values from strings and for comparing versions,
    respectively.  The version comparing function accepts either
    Pk_Version or string formatted versions indistinctly.

  - The new built-in function `rtrace' prints out the current call
    stack in the PVM, a function name in each line.  It makes use of
    the new PVM instruction of the same name.

  - The new built-in function `iosearch' allows searching for IO
    spaces by name/handler from Poke programs.

Standard Poke Library updates
=============================

  - The new built-in `openmmap' function allows to create
    MMAP-operated IO spaces in Poke programs.

  - New functions `isdigit' and `isxdigit' have been added to the
    standard library, that check whether a given character is a
    decimal digit or an hexadecimal digit respectively.

  - New function `strrchr' has been added to the standard library,
    that finds th elast occurrence of a character in a string and
    returns either its index or, if the character is not found, minus
    one.

  - New function `strtoi' has been added to the standard library, that
    parses a numeric denotation on a string and returns the result and
    the number of parsed characters.

  - The function `atoi' has been refactored to be defined in terms of
    `strtoi'.

  - New function `strtok' has been added to the standard library, that
    helps tokenizing strings.

  - New function `strstr' has been added to the standard library, that
    searches for a sub-string in some given string.

  - The standard function `stoca' has been changed so it doesn't
    always require passing an array to it.  If no array is passed then
    it allocates and returns an array by itself.  This is backwards
    compatible.

libpoke updates
===============

  - A new service pk_keyword_p is available in libpoke, that tells
    whether a given name is a keyword in the Poke language.

  - When calling pk_load specifying a module that has already been
    loaded, it is now loaded again and all the definitions in it are
    re-defined.  This makes the libpoke service to match the behavior
    of the `load' Poke language construction.

  - The libpoke library now supports the handling of delimited alien
    tokens with the form $<[^>]*>.

  - New services pk_register_thread and pk_unregister_thread have been
    added in order to allow using libpoke in multi-threaded programs.

  - We have done more work to remove global state from libpoke, with
    the goal that someday it shall be possible for a single program to
    have several instances of the poke incremental compiler.  We are
    not there yet, but getting near.

  - New services pk_set_debug_p and pk_get_last_ast_str have been
    added to libpoke, which set the incremental compiler in debug mode
    and makes it possible to get a printable representation of the AST
    (abstract syntax tree) corresponding to the last compiled
    expression.

  - The pk_ios_search service now gets a flag argument, enabling the
    user to select between exact or partial matching of the handler
    while searching for the IOS.

  - New services pk_set_user_data and pk_get_user_data are added in
    order to set a user-defined payload that gets passed back in
    several libpoke callbacks.

  - The terminal interface in libpoke has been updated so a reference
    to the pk_compiler incremental compiler is passed to all the
    callbacks.

Pickles updates
===============

  - A new pickle `srec' has been added for editing, encoding and
    decoding Motorola SREC files.

  - A new pickle `orc' has been added for poking at ORC data, which is
    the stack unwinding format used within the Linux kernel.

  - A new pickle `gcov' has been added for editing GCOV data (.gcda)
    and notes (.gcno) files.

  - A new pickle `base64' has been added to poke, that provides
    functions to encode and decode data in base64 as defined by the
    RFC 4648.

  - A new pickle `iscan' has been added to poke, that provides a
    framework implementing Icon-like scanning contexts.

  - A new pickle `iscan-str' has been added to poke, that provides
    Icon-like scanning capabilities in Poke strings.

  - A new pickle `gpt' pickle has been added to poke at GUID partition
    tables.

  - A new pickle `jojodiff' has been added to generate and apply
    JojoDiff binary patches.  An accompanying pk-jojopatch utility is
    also provided.

  - A new pickle `linux' has been added to poke, that provides
    internal data structures used by the Linux kernel.

  - The ELF pickle is now developed and distributed separately in its
    own project: https://jemarch.net/poke-elf.

  - The DWARF pickle is now developed and distributed separately in
    its own project: https://jemarch.net/poke-dwarf.

  - The sframe pickle has been updated to reflect AArch64 PAuth
    information.

  - The PE pickle now supports //BASE64 encoded names, which is a
    Microsoft extension.

  - The BTF pickle now performs more data integrity checks, and also
    now supports BTF_KIND_ENUM64 entries.

  - All the pickles distributed with GNU poke have been modified so
    they don't use standard types like `int' or 'long' anymore.  This
    is to make it possible to use them in non-poke applications
    integrating with libpoke, like GDB.

Build system updates
====================

  - poke, libpoke and pokefmt now builds and runs natively in Windows.

  - Different components in the source tree (poked, pokefmt) can now
    be disabled using the --disable-poked and --disable-pokefmt
    command-line options.

  - A file poke.m4 is now installed, that provides the macros
    PK_PROG_POKE and PK_CHECK_PICKLE.  These macros are to be used by
    projects and packages that install GNU poke pickles.  The first
    macro checks for a particular version of poke, whereas the second
    checks for the availability of some particular pickle.

Documentation updates
=====================

  - The manual has been fixed to refer to `gettime' instead of
    `get_time'.  This function changed name in 3.0.

  - The GNU poke manual in `info' format is now installed under its
    own directory category (GNU poke) rather than under Editors.  This
    is because other poke related projects like poke-elf and
    poke-dwarf also install manuals under this new directory category.

--
Jose E. Marchesi
Frankfurt am Main
30 March 2024