The 6-dimension Rust messaging framework: Mediator, Bus, Outbox, Sagas, Scheduler, Request/Reply.
Hexeract is a server-side messaging framework written in Rust. It unifies in-process mediator handlers, external message bus transports, transactional outbox and inbox, long-running sagas, scheduled messages and request/reply RPC in a single coherent SDK. The framework relies on Rust's type system and procedural macros to provide compile-time guarantees in place of runtime reflection.
Hexeract is sponsored by Encelade Technologies.
🚧 Pre-alpha, no usable release yet.
| Phase | State |
|---|---|
| 1. Product vision and scope | ✅ Closed (2026-05-21) |
| 2. Technical architecture | ⏳ In progress |
| 3. Open source strategy | ⏳ Pending |
| 4. Proof of concept (1 to 2 weeks spike) | ⏳ Pending |
| 5. v0.1.0 public release | ⏳ Target Q4 2026 |
The repository is intentionally private during vision and architecture phases. It will be opened to the public once Phase 3 publishes the technical design. Do not depend on it yet, anything can change until v0.1.0.
Building event-driven services in Rust today means manually wiring a broker client, an outbox table, a job queue, a workflow library and a saga state machine together. Hexeract closes that gap with a single SDK that covers the full surface area while keeping each feature independently usable:
- Mediator, dispatch commands to handlers in-process, type-safe and reflection-free.
- Bus, send messages to RabbitMQ, NATS, Kafka or AWS SQS through a unified transport abstraction.
- Outbox, save business state and outgoing messages atomically in a single database transaction.
- Sagas, orchestrate long-running workflows with persisted state, retries and compensations.
- Scheduler, schedule messages for later delivery, with cron, delays, exponential backoff retries and dead-letter handling.
- Request/Reply, perform RPC-style synchronous calls on top of an asynchronous bus via correlation identifiers.
The bet behind Hexeract is that Rust's compile-time guarantees turn the outbox pattern from a vigilance discipline into something the type system enforces.
To stay focused, the following are explicitly out of scope:
- Not a service mesh. No automatic mTLS or network policies between services. Use Linkerd or Istio.
- Not a broker. Hexeract is a client; you keep your existing RabbitMQ, NATS or Kafka.
- Not a standalone workflow engine. Sagas live inside your services, not in a dedicated cluster. Use Temporal or Airflow when you need that shape.
- Not an event streaming engine. No real-time stream processing. Use Kafka Streams or Apache Flink.
- Rust backend teams building microservices who want a cohesive messaging toolkit instead of stacking incompatible crates.
- Developers migrating to Rust looking for a cohesive messaging SDK.
- Polyglot teams with part of their stack moving to Rust and the need to stay interoperable on a shared bus alongside their Node, Python or Go services.
Hexeract is in pre-alpha and its public API is unstable. The repository is currently private to keep the design conversation focused. Once Phase 2 finalises the architecture, the repo will be opened and a CONTRIBUTING.md will document the contribution model.
Hexeract is distributed under the terms of the MIT license.
Copyright © Encelade Technologies.