Amber v1.16.0

v1.16.0 is a runtime release, not a marketing reset. The binary is still amber. The capability map is still Current Scope. Node.js Conformance 5.0 is still 55/55.

What changed:

Wasm Engine 2.0

WebAssembly.Memory and V8 ArrayBuffer can share a backing store (new_backing_store_from_ptr). Large modules can be mmap'd. require('amber:wasm') exposes host pointers. This is Preview. V8 still compiles Wasm; Amber does not ship a custom JIT.

amber bundle and amber compile

Both Preview.

• amber bundle walks static local imports with oxc, wraps modules in __amberjs_require__, optional minify.
• amber compile copies the host amber binary and appends a payload plus a AMBER_STANDALONE trailer.

Neither is webpack, esbuild, or pkg.

URL / fetch / ReadableStream

The previous JS wrappers were the bottleneck. v1.16.0 puts URL parsing, HTTP/1.1 keep-alive GET, and the ReadableStream queue on a JIT-friendly path.

On Apple M2 Max, 2026-09-16, vs Node v22.22.3:

Workload	Amber	Node
URL + URLSearchParams (20k)	7.28 ms	12.54 ms
fetch 100 sequential GETs	6.51 ms	17.00 ms
ReadableStream 5k chunks	0.92 ms	1.16 ms

Bun still wins several microbenches and cold start. Numbers live in benchmarks/.

What did not change

Amber is not a Node.js clone. Coverage is per-API. Package management, N-API, and several CLI extras stay Experimental.

Install:

curl -fsSL https://get.amberjs.com/install.sh | AMBER_VERSION=v1.16.0 sh