After a bit more than one year we have finally put together a new release of Amber - the web developer's best friend:

       http://www.amber-lang.net

Yeah, we know, too long time for a release cycle, but we think you will like this release!

First - let's run the numbers - since the 0.9.1 release there have been over 850 commits (compared to 250 for 0.9.1). We have closed 364 issues and added 150 new unit tests bringing us to 271 in total. All classes in the kernel now have comments and there are Travis jobs to keep us all in line. Forks on github have gone up from 43 to 83 with 365 followers. Phew.

And what goodies does this give us?

Well, first Nicolas got carried away with compiler technology (must have read a book or something) and added a whole new Super Duper compiler tool chain providing both an AST with annotations and an Intermediate Representation layer (IR) enabling semantic analysis and easier optimizations, a better inlining mechanism, support for block contexts (whoa!) and an AST interpreter to round it off.

Wait a minute, what? An interpreter? Why on earth would we want a... oh. To be able to implement a full stepping debugger of course (coming in 1.0). Baddabing!

Just the new compiler tool chain would have been enough for a release, but since Nicolas is not the only Elf in Amber land this release also includes SUnit improvements and cleanup with support for async assertions, a new build system based on gruntjs replacing the old makefiles (seems slicker in the land of JS), an improved ClassBuilder with better class migration support and a new amberc compiler written in Amber instead of that ghastly bash script... (deep breath) ...and an improved loader to be able to use 3rd party packages, improved kernel classes, and updated documentation.

And we also split the github repo into three separate repos - Amber itself, the examples and the website - and yeah, the website got a new look.

...and a whole new IDE is brewing called Helios (in the helios branch). But nah, sorry, Helios will land in 1.0. :)

We hope you join us in developing Amber and having fun! Fork at github, join in #amber-lang on freenode and hop onto the mailing list.

/the Amber crew
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