I don’t know if it is ideal for a research paper, but we have been using semgrep with Rust. Semgrep allows you to write your own linter rules to enforce code standards. I have found some basic rules on the internet (e.g no unwrap()) but we have mostly had to write our own rules because there are only a few for Rust.

I think it would be a helpful project to write a Semgrep rule set that Rust developers could use. Maybe the “research” part would be looking at rulesets for other languages.

I don’t think the survey was advertised? For me it popped up when I was writing something in the Rust Playground.