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

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.