Hello! I’m a 3rd year CS student, and next semester I’d like to write a research paper (it’d be my first) related to rust, static analysis or programming languages, or even all of them to some degree. Something about functional programming would work as well.
Any ideas of something interesting that I could research and write about?
I’d love static analysis that finds which functions may panic, which are guaranteed not to. On a related note, it’d be nice to be able to hoist panics out of loops and coalesce multiple consecutive assertions into one (llvm can’t do it, because partially done work is a side effect).
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.
