New type solver and related progress

The great type solver rewrite is finally finished and all tests are passing! I've been working really hard on this, I even took 3 days off of work this week so that I could work on the compiler - I felt that things were getting really close to a conclusion and I was having trouble focusing on my regular work. (Although I did do *some* vacation-y stuff - like hiking in the redwoods with a friend.) However, it wasn't until yesterday morning that I actually solved the last bug and was able to commit a working version. Since then I've done a bunch of cleanup work, deleting old code that is now no longer needed, and so on.

I also noticed that LLVM's output stream class now supports ANSI color, so I added some code to display error messages in red, warnings in yellow and so on. Another thing I added was a new macro which helps debug non-fatal errors - in debug builds, it will print out the file and line number to set a breakpoint in the debugger, so you can just cut and paste it from the console instead of having to search for the error message in the source code. (A typical code pattern I use in the compiler is that when an operation fails, after printing out the error message, I reset the state and try the operation again - this makes it easy to trace through it in the debugger.)

All that being said, there's one caveat - while all this was going on, LLVM just dropped in a massive change to their APIs. I've actually been a supporter of this particular change and have been awaiting it with much anticipation, however it means that the next time I sync to LLVM I've got a fair bit of work to do.

In terms of release plans: I did a sort of "pre-announcement" of my 0.1 release on the LLVM mailing lists. I didn't get much response, which is no surprise - most people there are focused on their own projects. There are several other places where I could publicize Tart. One is the internal mailing list for language enthusiasts at Google. I will probably get a much larger reaction there, although a lot of it will most likely be negative - I expect a lot of criticism from the functional-language enthusiasts, and a lot of heat from partisans of competing languages like Scala and Go. There are also various newsgroups and mailing lists, although I don't really know my way around those fora and would be concerned about posting in the wrong place. At one point I considered posting on one of the Python mailing lists, based on the rationale that Tart is in many ways "inspired by" Python, but that rationale now seems weak to me.

Of course, I have another outlet, which is my 1500+ followers on Google+, most of whom I'm guessing are non-technical, so my announcement would be meaningless to the vast majority of them I suspect.