Article · AI translation
IT Home reported on November 5 that Discord co-founder and chief technology officer Stanislav Vishnevskiy confirmed on X today that Discord has dropped Electron and is rewriting its desktop client in Rust, using the GPUI framework for the interface layer.
He also said the mobile apps will gradually migrate to Rust, replacing the React Native currently used by the iOS and Android versions. The mobile apps will retain native UIs and share application code with the desktop client through Rust.
A Windows 11 Task Manager screenshot he shared on X showed a process named “Discord Phoenix” using 290.2 MB of memory. He later explained that the client in the screenshot was logged into two accounts at once (the new client supports multiple simultaneous account sessions). By comparison, the old Electron client typically uses 1 GB to 2 GB of memory while idle and can reach 4 GB in extreme cases.
In fact, Discord acknowledged the Windows client’s resource usage problem last year. In December 2025, a Discord employee confirmed on Reddit that the company was testing a mechanism to automatically restart the client when memory usage exceeds 4 GB.
At the time, Discord said memory usage should be below 1 GB during normal use and that it had identified and fixed multiple memory leak scenarios, reducing P95 memory usage under heavy load by about 5%.
IT Home note: P95 is the value at the 95% position when users’ memory usage data is sorted from lowest to highest, representing a high-load level after excluding the most extreme 5% of cases.
Publicly available information indicates that Electron’s resource overhead stems from its architecture: each Electron application bundles a complete Chromium browser engine, instead of sharing resources with the system browser as WebView does. Discord is considered one of the less well-optimized Electron applications, with memory usage continuing to climb after opening servers or using it for a long time.
The new client did not choose Tauri, another Rust-based framework. Tauri uses the operating system’s WebView to render its interface, which avoids bundling Chromium but still relies on a web engine. GPUI, which Discord ultimately chose, was developed by the Zed editor team. It is a GPU-accelerated native Rust UI framework that does not rely on WebView or Chromium to draw the interface.
Vishnevskiy said the new application uses the system WebView only for embedded content such as YouTube and Activities. The application itself is native and retains the look and behavior of the current version.
Vishnevskiy described “running the entire client on Rust” as a longstanding goal and said the new client would enter user testing “soon,” but gave no official release date. Discord has not yet issued a separate official announcement.