Discord is moving away from Electron and switching to Rust. The service's desktop client is to be moved entirely to this programming language, which promises lower memory requirements and faster startup. The announcement was made by Discord's chief technology officer Stanislav Vishnevskiy.
According to Windows Report, Windows Latest and Windows Central, the company is abandoning Electron. The new client uses GPUI instead, so it does not have to embed Chromium. Discord has been using Rust since 2018, for its infrastructure, voice technologies and part of the current client.
Why Discord is moving away from Electron and switching to Rust
Electron allows desktop applications to be built on web technologies. Thanks to it, developers use a single codebase for Windows, macOS and Linux, Windows Central reported. However, such applications tend to be demanding on system resources. According to Windows Report and Windows Latest, the current Discord client on Electron sometimes consumes more than 4 GB of RAM.
According to the same outlets, an early version of the new client called Discord Phoenix on Windows 11 managed with approximately 290 MB of RAM. In a side-by-side comparison on two Lenovo ThinkPad laptops running Windows 11, Windows Central reported that the new version written in Rust launched faster than the current Electron application.
Mobile will remain native, code will be shared
The changes will also affect the mobile applications. Discord will abandon React Native on mobile, but will keep the native interface. The mobile app is to share a larger part of the code with the desktop client precisely through Rust.
It is not clear when Discord will release the new client. According to Windows Report, the company has not announced a public release date. According to Vishnevskiy, Discord wants to test the new version with users soon.