Discord Is Dropping Electron for a Rust App That Used 290MB of RAM

CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy says the rebuild also drops React Native and should reach testing with users "soon," but there's no date yet.

Discord's chief technology officer, Stanislav Vishnevskiy, posted a picture of Discord's Windows app using 290MB of memory. It isn't the app on your PC.

It's a rebuild written entirely in Rust, a programming language made for speed and safe memory handling. That means Discord is giving up on Electron, the toolkit that lets companies turn web code into desktop apps, The Verge reported Thursday. The gap matters: the current Windows app can easily climb past 1GB of RAM once a user has joined a few servers, according to The Verge.

Rust isn't new at Discord. "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," Vishnevskiy wrote on X, as The Verge reported. On phones, React Native goes too. The mobile apps keep their native look but will share their underlying code with the desktop app, he said.

Here's why Electron runs heavy. Every Electron app ships with its own copy of Chromium, browser files similar to those that sit in the install folders of Microsoft Edge and Brave, Windows Latest explained. Discord's app carries its own copy of all that, just to show chat.

Switching to Rust alone wouldn't guarantee a lighter app. Tauri, another Rust-friendly option, usually still draws a web page through the operating system's built-in browser view, Windows Latest noted. Vishnevskiy cut that guess off: "And it's not Tauri, it's GPUI, so good guess everyone," he wrote, per Windows Latest. GPUI draws the desktop interface itself.

The screenshot is a company's own early build, not a shipped product. Windows Latest said it was labeled "Discord Phoenix" and showed 290.2MB of RAM on Windows 11. The site also said it understands the new app will skip the "Starting" screen, since there are no Electron libraries left to load.

Discord hasn't said when the switch will happen. Vishnevskiy said only that the company hopes to get the app into testing with users soon. Until then, Discord on Windows is still the Electron app, Chromium copy and all.

Source: The Verge, retrieved November 5, 2026. Other sources: windowslatest.com.