THE CRUNCH
Discord is abandoning Electron, the framework that lets developers build desktop apps with web technologies, and rebuilding its entire client in Rust, a programming language designed for speed and memory safety. Chief technology officer Stanislav Vishnevskiy said Discord has been an early Rust adopter since 2018, with much of its infrastructure, voice tech and parts of the current client already written in the language. The full client was, in his words, the holy grail.
The payoff, at least on Windows, appears to be memory use. Vishnevskiy shared a screenshot of the new Discord Windows client using 290MB of RAM, a clear improvement on the current app, where taking part in a few servers can easily push usage past 1GB. Electron apps are notoriously heavy on system resources, which is part of why Discord is making the switch.
Mobile is handled differently: it keeps its native interface but will share app code with the desktop version through Rust. React Native goes away alongside Electron. Discord has not said when the full switch will happen, though Vishnevskiy said the company hopes to put the new client into testing with users soon.