Software is updated from time to time to address bugs, fix security holes, add new features, improve upon performance, and optimized for new hardware. These updates usually require the user to download and install them which honestly isn’t that big of a deal or a huge inconvenience, but for the sake of efficiency and future-proofing, DARPA is looking into creating software that will never need to be updated for years to come.How will this work, you ask? According to DARPA, they will be looking into creating algorithms that could allow them to create software that can dynamically adapt to changes, like in other software it is running on such as its operating system, or even hardware like on a smartphone, tablet, or computer that you might have recently upgraded with a new processor, RAM, GPU, and etc.
Dubbed “Building Resource Adaptive Software Systems or BRASS,” the official description of the program reads, “The goal of the Building Resource Adaptive Software Systems program (BRASS) is to realize foundational advances in the design and implementation of long-lived, survivable and complex software systems that are robust to changes in the physical and logical resources provided by their ecosystem.”
It definitely sounds promising as this could mean that organizations or even the military could run hardware that will never need downtime to upgrade which could prove costly, like in the case of Microsoft ending support for Windows XP which saw a lot of companies forced to spend time and money in upgrading the software for their computers and other machines.
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