Discord drops Electron for a Rust app that uses far less memory

Electron is a free tool that lets developers build desktop apps using web technology. You write a website, and Electron wraps it in a window so it looks like a normal program. It bundles two parts: Chromium, the engine behind Chrome, and Node.js, a tool that runs web code outside a browser.

That is why so many apps use it. One team can ship the same app on Windows, Mac and Linux. Visual Studio Code, Slack, Figma, Notion and ChatGPT's desktop app are all built this way, and so is Discord.

The catch is size. Every Electron app carries its own copy of Chromium. Open the Discord folder on a Windows PC and you can spot the Chromium files, the same kind you find inside a browser. Think of it as every app bringing its own kitchen when all it wanted was a sandwich.

Vishnevskiy posted the plan on X. In his words: "We've been early adopters of Rust since 2018 and a lot of our infra, voice tech, and even some of the current client is already Rust, the holy grail was getting the whole client there."

He went on: "That means Electron goes away, and so does React Native, mobile keeps native UI but shares app code with desktop via Rust."

In plain words, there are three changes:

• Desktop: Electron is dropped and the app is rebuilt in Rust.
• Mobile: the phone apps keep their native screens, the ones built for iPhone and Android, but share their inner code with desktop.
• React Native: this is a tool for building phone apps with web-style code. It goes away too.

Vishnevskiy also showed a picture of the Discord Windows client using just 290MB of RAM. RAM is the short-term memory your computer uses for whatever is open right now.

Rust is a programming language designed for speed and memory safety. Discord has used it for years, so this is not a leap into the unknown.

In 2020, a Discord engineer wrote about moving a busy service called Read States from the Go language to Rust. Read States tracks which channels and messages each person has read. It handles billions of read states, with hundreds of thousands of cache updates every second.

The old version had a problem. Go uses garbage collection, which means the program pauses now and then to hunt for memory it no longer needs. Discord wrote that Go "will force a garbage collection run every 2 minutes at minimum", and that caused spikes in delay.

Rust has no garbage collector. Data is freed the moment it is no longer needed. After the switch, the average response time dropped from milliseconds to microseconds, and the spikes disappeared.

In real life Garbage collection is like a cleaner who walks through the whole office every two minutes to see what can be thrown away. Rust is more like each person clearing their own desk as they finish.

Choosing Rust alone would not say much about how the app looks and feels. A Rust app could still show a web page inside. That is why the second detail matters: Vishnevskiy said the new app uses GPUI.

GPUI is a user interface framework, the toolkit that draws buttons, text and scrolling lists. The team behind the Zed code editor built it. They describe it as inspired by video games: instead of drawing everything with general web tools, it gives each basic shape, such as rectangles, shadows, text and icons, its own small program that runs on the graphics chip.

The Zed team aims for 120 frames per second. At that speed the app has only 8.33 milliseconds to draw each frame. The team has said that with a web-based approach, "no matter how hard we tried, there was always something in the way of delivering frames on time."

Tauri is another popular tool that works with Rust. But it usually shows a web interface using the web view that already comes with your operating system. So the app would still be a website in a frame, just a lighter frame.

Vishnevskiy answered that guess directly: "it's not Tauri, it's GPUI, so good guess everyone." That tells us Discord is not keeping the web interface at all. Windows Latest, which first spotted the post, also understands that the new app will no longer show a "Starting" screen, because it won't need to load Electron's libraries.

Heavy enough that the company has noticed. In day-to-day use the Windows app often sits at 1GB to 2GB of RAM, even when idle. Memory use grows as you open servers and keep using the app. Even with only a few servers, usage can easily hit 1GB or more.

Discord has also admitted the top end. In a Reddit post in December 2025, a Discord employee wrote: "Yes, we're testing a restart when memory exceeds 4GB (normal usage is <1GB)." The company also said it saw a 5% drop in p95 memory, meaning the memory level that 95 out of 100 sessions stay under.

By comparison, 290MB is a big drop. It is one early screenshot, so treat it as a promising sign, not a promise. Real numbers will come from testing with real users in many servers.

Quite a lot. Discord is still early in this work.

• Release date: Vishnevskiy did not say when the full switch happens. He said the company hopes to get it into testing with users soon.
• Names: the early build appeared in a screenshot listed as "Discord Phoenix". We don't know if that will be a public name.
• Other systems: the early picture showed Windows 11. Mac and Linux plans have not been shared.
• Features: Discord has not said whether anything will look or work differently.

Discord is one of the most visible Electron apps. When a company this big says the web-in-a-box approach is not enough, other developers notice.

Electron remains popular for a reason: it is faster for a small team to build. A Rust rewrite takes real effort, and not every company can do it. Discord already has Rust in its servers, its voice system and parts of its client, so it has a head start.

For people on Windows, the story has a bigger angle. Many popular apps are built on web frameworks, and each one adds to the memory bill. If a chat app that stays open all day gets lighter, that is a gain for everyone with an older laptop.

• If you use Discord on a PC: you should see a lighter app when the new version arrives, but there is no date yet.
• If you run Discord in the background all day: the biggest change may be that your computer has more free memory for games and other apps.
• If you use Discord on your phone: the screens stay native. The code underneath will be shared with desktop.
• If you build apps: watch how this goes. It shows what happens when a team leaves the web-in-a-box approach.