Discord is moving its desktop app off Electron and onto Rust, the company's chief technology officer, Stanislav Vishnevskiy, said in a post on X. Electron is the cross-platform framework that lets developers build desktop apps with web technologies, and it has long been criticized for how much memory and processing power those apps consume.
Vishnevskiy also shared an image of the Discord Windows client running on just 290MB of RAM. That is a clear improvement over the current Windows app, which according to The Verge can easily pass 1GB once you are active in a handful of servers. Discord says it hopes to get the new client into testing with users soon, but has not given a date for the full switch.
Why Discord is choosing Rust over Electron
Discord is not new to Rust. Vishnevskiy said the company has been an early adopter of the language since 2018, and that much of its infrastructure, voice technology and even parts of the current client already run on it. In his words, getting the whole client onto Rust was "the holy grail".
Rust is designed for speed and memory safety, two areas where Electron has drawn the most complaints. According to The Verge, the change means Electron goes away, and React Native goes with it. Mobile keeps its native interface but will share application code with the desktop client through Rust.
- Rust adoption at Discord started in 2018
- Infrastructure, voice tech and parts of the current client already use Rust
- Electron and React Native are both being retired
