February 11, 2026
Compiler turns hall monitor
Show HN: Hibana – An Affine MPST Runtime for Rust
Rust tool promises safer app chats; HN cheers, begs plain English and a working link
TLDR: Hibana wants Rust apps to follow conversation rules so they don’t get stuck, checked upfront by the compiler. The community is intrigued but demands a simple explanation and a public demo link, turning smart tech into a “great idea, now translate and fix the repo” moment.
Hibana swooped into Hacker News with a bold claim: your compiler could prove your app’s conversations won’t get stuck (think: two programs waiting on each other forever). It’s built for Rust, and the demo reads like “Ping-Pong for grown-ups,” projecting a script at compile time and forcing the runtime to follow it. Sounds fancy! But the crowd’s mood? Equal parts impressed and confused. One top commenter pleaded: “Explain this like I’m human,” asking what “Affine Multi-Party Session Types” even are and how this ties to “choreographies” (a fancy word for pre-planned message exchange). Another commenter spotted a broken GitHub link and wondered if the QUIC demo repo was accidentally kept private — cue collective facepalm. The thread turned into a split-screen: the math-and-type-theory fans nodding vigorously at session types, while everyone else begged for a plain-English explainer and a working demo link. Still, there’s hype: the no-std/no-alloc angle means this could run on tiny, stripped-down environments, which some devs love. With “Preview” status and evolving APIs, Hibana teased deep correctness and sparked a very online debate: ship the tech, but say it in English — and don’t let the link 404.
Key Points
- •Hibana is a preview affine MPST engine for Rust focused on proving protocols are deadlock-free by construction.
- •Its core targets #![no_std] and #![no_alloc] environments, making it suitable for constrained systems.
- •Developers define a global choreography, which is then projected at compile time into per-role programs.
- •Affine execution with cursors enforces valid protocol progression, guided by the compiler.
- •The hibana crate is the core; additional public demos illustrate practical usability.