Discord Rebuilds Its Desktop and Mobile Apps in Rust, Dropping Electron

Vishnevskiy confirmed the plan on November 4, a day after telling a user that the team was working on "a much bigger update". Discord has not published a formal announcement, feature list or release date. Vishnevskiy said the company hopes to get the new client "into testing with users soon™".

The main reason for the rewrite is memory use. Electron apps bundle a full browser engine, and Discord's desktop client has a reputation for heavy resource use on Windows. Windows Latest reported that the current app can take up to 4GB of RAM on Windows 11. A Task Manager screenshot shared by Vishnevskiy showed a process called "Discord Phoenix" using 290.2MB. He later said that build was running two accounts at once, which the new app supports. Discord has not published benchmarks, so the figure comes from a single early build and has not been tested independently.

The new desktop interface is built on GPUI, a Rust user-interface framework, and not on Tauri, the Rust-based Electron alternative that some users had guessed. According to Inven Global's account of his posts, Vishnevskiy said Discord has added its own patches to GPUI and may contribute some of them back to the project. The app is native and calls on the system's built-in web view only for embedded features such as YouTube and Activities. "The app looks and works identically to the current one," Vishnevskiy said, adding: "We expect it to be better."

On phones, Discord will keep native interfaces but share the underlying app code with desktop through Rust. Vishnevskiy described getting the entire client onto Rust as "the holy grail".

The company already uses Rust heavily. Its infrastructure, voice technology and parts of the current client are written in it, and in 2020 it described moving a core backend service from Go to Rust to remove latency spikes. On mobile, Discord's iOS app started on React Native, and the Android app moved to the framework a few years ago because it kept falling behind on features.

The rewrite tests whether a large consumer app can get off web-wrapper frameworks without losing the speed of shipping one codebase across platforms, which is the trade-off that led many companies to adopt Electron and React Native in the first place. Discord has not said whether the browser version of the service will change, or what will happen to third-party client modifications built for the Electron app.