{
  "id": 1496073,
  "title": "GNU poke 5.0 released",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/08/17/gnu-poke-5-0-released",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-08-17T14:00:20.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "LWN",
    "slug": "lwn",
    "url": "https://lwn.net/Articles/1089211/"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Version 5.0 of GNU Poke, an interactive binary-data editor, has been released. This release includes several enhancements to the Poke compiler, language, runtime, and standard library. The full list of changes is provided below.\n\nKey improvements in this release include:\n\n* User interface updates: The hyperlink server can now bind to a user-specified port for listening to commands.\n* Poke language updates: Floating-point arithmetic is now supported for uint32 and uint64 types, with proper interpretation as single- and double-precision floating-point numbers per the IEEE 754 standard. Various arithmetic and comparison operations have been added.\n* Poke runtime updates: Support for reactive IO spaces has been added, improving performance for read-intensive programs. Several undefined behaviors related to left-shifts have been fixed, and error messages have been improved.\n* Poke compiler updates: The compiler now handles writes to nested integral struct/unions fields correctly. Two new functions, sqrtf and sqrtd, have been added to calculate the square root of single and double-precision floating-point numbers.\n* Standard Poke library updates: Two new functions for calculating square roots, closure pretty printer now includes the closure's name, and several improvements have been made to the library.\n* IO subsystem updates: IOS_F_TRUNCATE has been re-introduced, and the pickle module has been updated with improved functionality and added methods.\n* Platform support: Efforts have been made to improve MinGW compilation, though a fully functional MinGW poke executable is still not available.\n\nThe full source tarball is available for download from https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/poke/poke-5.0.tar.gz, signed and accompanied by a PGP signature at https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/poke/poke-5.0.tar.gz.sig.",
  "summary": "Version 5.0 of GNU Poke , a binary-data editor, has been released. This release includes a number of improvements to the Poke compiler, additions to the Poke language, as well as runtime and standard library updates. See below for the full list of changes.",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}