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Discord is one of the most popular communication platforms among gamers, allowing them to stay connected with friends, join communities, and communicate while playing games. However, the desktop app has often been criticized for consuming too much RAM, even when running in the background. Fortunately, Discord is now working on a major change that could significantly improve performance, as the company has confirmed that it is moving away from Electron in favor of a new client built using Rust.
The announcement comes directly from Discord co-founder and CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy, who recently shared details about the upcoming changes on X. According to him, Discord has been using Rust in different parts of its technology since 2018, including its voice systems and some parts of the existing client. However, the company now plans to take things further by rebuilding the entire desktop application using Rust.
This means Discord will no longer rely on Electron, which has been used to power its desktop app for years. For those unfamiliar, Electron allows developers to build applications using web technologies, making it easier to support different operating systems. However, one of its biggest drawbacks is that it can consume a significant amount of system memory, as Electron-based apps include their own browser components.
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This has been a particular problem for Discord users, especially those who keep the application running while gaming. Depending on how many servers are open and how the app is being used, memory consumption can sometimes reach 1GB or more. Discord has even acknowledged cases where the existing client can exceed 4GB of RAM, although that is not considered normal usage.
The good news is that the new client already appears to be showing promising results. Vishnevskiy shared an early screenshot of the Rust-based Discord application, reportedly called Discord Phoenix, running on Windows 11 and using just 290MB of RAM. While this is only an early demonstration and doesn’t necessarily represent memory usage during heavy activity, it suggests that the new version could be considerably more efficient.
And lower memory consumption isn’t the only improvement. Vishnevskiy also demonstrated the new client running alongside the current version on Windows 11 laptops. The Rust-based application launched faster, while navigating through the interface appeared noticeably more responsive.
“The new Discord client using less RAM is just part of the story,” Vishnevskiy said, adding that clicking around the interface feels almost instant.
Discord is also making changes to its mobile application. According to Vishnevskiy, the company is moving away from React Native, although the mobile apps will continue using native interfaces while sharing some of their underlying code with the desktop version through Rust. The new desktop interface will use GPUI rather than Tauri.
Another big change for the application following its recent announcement is that it’s making content now findable on Google.
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