Comment by vezzy-fnord | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vezzy-fnord | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure how they could even measure the goal here. The synopsis from FBO implies this is a broad program:

---- DARPA is soliciting innovative research proposals in the areas of formal methods, program analysis, compiler design, and runtime and virtual machine implementation to realize tools for the construction of long-lived, survivable, and scalable adaptive software systems. ----

Skimming over the PDF, they seem to be brainstorming all over the place without much of a clear direction.

There's nothing I can gauge that is theoretically stopping us from having century-long running software systems. It's already fully possible. All this talk about formal verification, replacing protocols, defining API/ABI subsets sounds over the top, when more fundamental issues are providing language runtimes that allow for high concurrent units of execution with resource and failure isolation, restart strategies, preemptive scheduling, live upgrade mechanisms and so forth. The VM is your platform.

And it's not like even that is strictly necessary. COBOL systems running on old iron chugs along merrily, though then again I've heard that mainframes have some rather elaborate fault tolerance mechanisms that haven't really leaked much into the rest of the mainstream.

Errrm, you are right so long as nothing changes. As soon as anything changes the merrily chugging COBOL becomes a weird frizzie step aunt from an obscure island near Antarctica and, well, stops the chugging and starts jitterbugging.

Then everyone does a "what the hell is going on" dance and wheels barrows full of cash into a carpark where "consultants" pour lighter fluid onto them and burn bonuses in a horrifying money sacrifice to the dark gods of bug fixing.

After awhile everything returns to normal.

Where did you hear the thing about fault tolerance from? Is there a seat at that bar for me?

Skimming over the PDF, they seem to be brainstorming all over the place without much of a clear direction.

That's exactly their remit - fantasize about cool stuff that seems technologically feasible and would provide a strategic advantage if we had it, and wait to see what sort of ideas people try to sell to them.

That's a reasonable point about COBOL, but it's be nice to have that sort of 'it just works' predictability in smaller and more modular packages.

As I said in another comment, but will repeat here: the goal is to make a new COBOL that can be mechanistically upgraded to run on new hardware, so that way we don't have to maintain legacy systems to run our dated code.

> 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.

Essentially, DARPA wants someone to build them a JVM and languages on top that formally specifies the VM dependencies to ensure secure execution (and execution at all), as well as the semantics of that language on top of the VM. Their goal is to use the formal specification to allow for automatic transfer of the VM to new hardware and platforms without breaking the security by changing something about the security model. A secondary goal is to allow automatic forward porting of things, so we don't have to run old iron (which make present security problems), we can run the latest iron with old code.

An example of what they're looking for is a system where you can provide a formal model of the new hardware, and it will compile a new VM for it which ensures the VM promises are true (which in turn ensures that the software promises are true, and hence that your security works). They're just not ready to produce such a thing yet, so they're still at the phase where they're gathering theoretical work on the topic, to decide on what their final approach will be.

This likely relates to their heavy funding of projects like HoTT (along with its applications to cryptography and other uses of formal methods), and is exactly in line with other major DARPA undertakings.

This sounds like the AS400 (IBM i).

Having read the Wikipedia article, it sounds like DARPA is looking for research papers about making a formally verifiable version of that idea, possibly with some more modern architecture ideas worked in.

Thank you! That was an excellent summary that didn't require me to look at that page any longer. I mean, I like contrast, but I want to keep my retinas, too.

yeah thats why its pretty cool - im not sure people get that easily from the darpa description.

ive been waiting for similar things to get done in the public domain or commercially, but whatever comes closer to it generally fails to get adoption (mostly for financial reasons..)

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