Discord moves its desktop app from Electron to Rust to cut memory use

[Katie8]

Discord is rebuilding its desktop app to make it lighter and faster. PC Gamer reports that the company is moving its client from Electron to Rust, using the GPUI framework with its own patches

Chief technology officer Stanislav Vishnevskiy showed the new client using about 290MB of memory while active. By comparison, the writer's current client uses 500 to 600MB, and a colleague saw 785MB on Windows

In a side by side demonstration, the new client started in about one second, compared with around six seconds for the old one. The goal is to move the whole client, which would also mean dropping React Native on mobile

There is no release date yet, and user testing is due soon. The figures are Discord's own and have not been independently tested

Electron apps are notorious for eating memory, so this is welcome news for anyone with Discord open all day while gaming. Halving memory use frees up resources for games themselves. Rewriting a whole client is a huge job, though, so patience may be needed

How much memory does Discord use on your PC? And should more apps move away from Electron?

Discord should be much quicker and less resource-intensive in the near futurewww.pcgamer.com