Discord Is Rebuilding Its App in Rust, Early Build Uses Just 290 MB

Discord is rewriting its desktop app in Rust and dropping Electron, and the early numbers look very promising. Discord CTO and co-founder Stanislav Vishnevskiy posted a Task Manager screenshot on X showing the new client, listed as "Discord Phoenix," using just 290.2 MB of RAM. In the same screenshot, Steam's WebHelper sits at 856 MB and Battle.net at 344 MB. That's a big drop, as Discord said late last year that its current Windows client normally stays under 1 GB, and it even tested auto-restarting the app once it crossed 4 GB. Vishnevskiy also shared a side-by-side clip on two laptops showing the new client booting much faster, adding that clicking around "feels instant."

Mobile is getting the same treatment. According to Vishnevskiy, Discord is dropping React Native as well, so the mobile apps will keep their native interface while sharing app code with the desktop client through Rust. The new client is built on GPUI, the Rust UI framework from the team behind the Zed code editor, rather than Tauri as many had guessed. There's no release date yet, and Discord only says it hopes to get it into testing with users soon. Read full story