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.

Sorry for the late answer. Those days, I'm interested in Ante. The language creator has some novel ideas for a non-GC memory safe language. And the compiler is written in Rust. It's not finished at all tho.