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From the phys.org article:
As modern software systems continue inexorably to increase in complexity and capability, users have become accustomed to periodic cycles of updating and upgrading to avoid obsolescence—if at some cost in terms of frustration. In the case of the U.S. military, having access to well-functioning software systems and underlying content is critical to national security, but updates are no less problematic than among civilian users and often demand considerable time and expense. That is why today DARPA announced it will launch an ambitious four-year research project to investigate the fundamental computational and algorithmic requirements necessary for software systems and data to remain robust and functional in excess of 100 years.
The Building Resource Adaptive Software Systems, or BRASS, program seeks to realize foundational advances in the design and implementation of long-lived software systems that can dynamically adapt to changes in the resources they depend upon and environments in which they operate. Such advances will necessitate the development of new linguistic abstractions, formal methods, and resource-aware program analyses to discover and specify program transformations, as well as systems designed to monitor changes in the surrounding digital ecosystem. The program is expected to lead to significant improvements in software resilience, reliability and maintainability.
DARPA's press release and call for research proposals.
(Score: 4, Informative) by NotSanguine on Friday April 10 2015, @05:04AM
The UCSD P-System [wikipedia.org] FTW!
Just port the execution environment [wikipedia.org] to new hardware platforms with performance tweaks and you're good to go!
I think I just saved the world! thank you, 20th century!
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday April 10 2015, @06:06PM
That's not a bad answer, but it needs a bit of generalization. ANY virtualized environment can last as long as people are willing to keep it running. The p-system may have the longest history, but that's also true for the java environment. If you pick a version and freeze it, it can easily be ported. And it's also true for the Python virtual machine. And...
The critical abstraction here is that there's a software implementation layer between the specified code and the hardware. And also you need to pick one particular version, and allow no changes except bug fixes. Personally I'm tempted to say the best choice is a VM, say the machine behind qemu. But that's just because it's more flexible.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.