(Feel free to substitute other expansions of the acronym.)
Giles is an S-expression. Its purpose is to document all aspects of Lisp culture.
It's appropriate that the programmable programming language (which brought recursion and reflection into the canon of computing) should be chronicled in its own syntax.
Presently Giles is like a newborn baby. The aim is to grow it into the biggest S-expression in the world. A 20-year-old Giles is expected to be in the ballpark of 100 gigabytes to a terabyte.
Giles is one S-expression.
The top level of Giles is a list of the form:
((2022 . entry)
(2023 . entry)
(2024 . entry))A new version of Giles is released annually. Each new version adds that year's entry to the top level of Giles. Prior years' entries stay intact, preserving a stable interface for historians.
Pre-release versions of Giles have an extra unstable entry:
((2022 . entry)
(2023 . entry)
(2024 . entry)
(unstable . entry))Upon release, the unstable entry is promoted to that year's
release. A new unstable entry then starts tracking the next year's
changes. At the beginning of each year, unstable picks up exactly
where the last year's entry left off. If no one works on Giles during
a given year, that year's entry will be identical to the previous
year's entry.
The early years of Giles are likely to be haphazard and full of experimentation as it struggles to orient itself to its vast surroundings. Eventually Giles will settle into a stable pattern and there will be less variation from year to year.
We will leverage shared structure to "copy" unchanged parts of earlier years' versions of Giles into later years' versions. This will help reduce the complexity and storage requirements of Giles.
Shared structure can also be used within a given year's version of Giles to present different views of the same data without duplicate storage.
A grown up Giles is expected to be more than 100 gigabytes. Few who take an interest in it will want to download this much data. Most people will only want to know a part of Giles.
By constitution, Giles involves Lisp culture only. A similar S-expression encompassing (for example) all of computing would be a useful object, but is beyond the energies of Giles' volunteer authors. All or part of Giles could be incorporated into such a project using shared structure.
Lispers know that it's the structure of code and data that makes a long term difference, not the surface syntax. Consequently, Giles is defined in terms of the identity of its constituent values. All or part of Giles can be encoded in any S-expression surface syntax which can express the data types required for that part.
Giles is expected to live and grow for many decades. That makes it unwise to rely on particular storage and transfer methods. Many times we will download a file from a URL to be incorporated into Giles. But the URL will surely go out of date, and in all likelihood the network protocol will too.
The only future-proof way to preserve data one cannot write out is to use a cryptographic hash of that data. We will use hashes extensively to refer to parts of Giles that would be cumbersome to write out in full.
The process of hashing bytevectors is self-evident. It's less clear how to hash other data types. Work on Giles will necessitate the development of ways to derive a hashable normal form out of a complex S-expression.
Giles will be shipped in a usable form as one or more Lisp programs that can retrieve parts of the S-expression (either by downloading them or by computing them).
Nevertheless, these interfaces will not serve as a definition of Giles. Giles shall always be considered an immutable value defined by the identity of its data. Later versions of Giles can be thought of as persistent data structures that refer to earlier versions as substructures.