Discord Is Ditching Electron: Rust Rebuild Sips 290MB of RAM

If your PC fans spin up the moment Discord opens, this one's for you.

Discord is rebuilding its desktop app from scratch in Rust and dropping Electron, the web-based framework behind the current client. The news comes straight from Discord co-founder and CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy, who shared the plan, and a very satisfying screenshot, on X this week.

290MB instead of a browser you didn't ask for

Every Electron app ships its own copy of Chromium. Running Discord today basically means running a second browser in the background, and the current Windows client can easily eat 1GB of RAM or more once you're in a few servers.

The early Windows build Vishnevskiy showed, listed as "Discord Phoenix" in Task Manager, used 290.2MB of RAM with two accounts signed in at once. He was quick to say memory is "only part of the story": the real focus is startup time. The new client skips the old loading screen entirely because it no longer has to preload Electron's libraries, and navigating it is described as feeling instant.

Rust all the way down (and no, it's not Tauri)

Discord isn't new to Rust. It has used the language since 2018 for infrastructure, voice tech, and parts of the current client. The hard part was always the client itself, which Vishnevskiy called the "holy grail" of the effort.

The rebuild also retires React Native on mobile: iOS and Android keep their native interfaces but share the underlying app code with desktop through Rust. One codebase, every platform, which is exactly the problem React Native was supposed to solve on Android.

For the curious: the interface is built on GPUI, the UI framework from the team behind the Zed code editor. When guesses pointed at Tauri, Vishnevskiy shut them down: "It's not Tauri, it's GPUI." The new app is fully native and only falls back to the system webview for embedded content like YouTube videos and Activities.

Visually, nothing changes. Vishnevskiy says the app looks and works exactly like the current one, just faster.

When can you try it?

Not yet. There is no release date, and Discord only says it hopes to get the new client into user testing soon. The screenshot making the rounds is an early internal build, so treat the 290MB figure as a promising preview rather than a final spec.

Still, if the shipped app lands anywhere near those numbers, your RAM might finally survive running Discord and a game at the same time. Imagine that.

Cover: Discord.com, captured November 2026.

Sources: The Verge, Developpez.com