A screenshot posted by Discord’s chief technology officer shows the company’s Windows client running on 290MB of RAM. The Windows app people use today can go past 1GB after you join a handful of servers.
That smaller number is the result of a rebuild. Discord is taking its desktop app off Electron and rewriting the whole thing in Rust. Electron is a cross-platform framework that lets developers make desktop apps with web technologies. Rust is a programming language designed for speed and memory safety.
Why Discord is dropping Electron
Electron apps have a reputation for using a lot of system resources, because each one runs its own copy of web technology. Users have complained about Discord’s memory use for a long time. When a chat app takes more than 1GB of RAM, it’s competing for memory with any game you have open next to it.
In a post on X, Discord CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy said the company has been working toward this for years.
“We’ve been early adopters of Rust since 2018 and a lot of our infra, voice tech, and even some of the current client is already Rust, the holy grail was getting the whole client there,” Vishnevskiy said. “That means Electron goes away, and so does React Native, mobile keeps native UI but shares app code with desktop via Rust.”
The mobile apps change too
Discord is also dropping React Native. Its phone apps will keep their native interfaces, and the code underneath them will be shared with the desktop client through Rust. That would leave Discord with one core codebase to maintain for both platforms.
What the 290MB figure does and doesn’t show
Vishnevskiy posted a single screenshot of a single client. It doesn’t show how many servers that client was in, what was open, or how long the app had been running. Right now the 290MB number comes only from Discord’s own CTO. Nobody outside the company has measured it, and that won’t change until more people have the new app.
Discord hasn’t said when the full switch will happen. According to Vishnevskiy, the company “hope to get it into testing with users soon.”