Despite using Tokio underneath, I think that Actix does NOT do work stealing and uses mostly separate threads:

• https://actix.rs/docs/server/#multi-threading
• https://docs.rs/actix-rt/latest/actix_rt/

Given this architecture, I think the article might inaccurate when it says that Actix handlers must be Send + Sync. See also: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/14cbe1u/why_does_actixwebs_handler_not_require_send/

Actix is a bit weird, but it has been around, and used in production, for a relatively long time.

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.