Discord is finally dropping Electron, the cross-platform framework that lets developers build desktop apps using web technologies. Electron web apps are notoriously system resource intensive, and Discord is now fully migrating its desktop app to Rust, a modern programming language designed for speed and memory safety.
“We’ve been early adopters of Rust since 2018 and a lot of our infra and voice technologies, and even some of our current customers are already Rust, the holy grail was to bring the whole customer there,” explains Stanislav Vishnevskiy, Discord’s CTO, in an article on
Vishnevskiy also shared an image of the Discord Windows client using only 290 MB of RAM, which is a big improvement since you only have to participate in a few servers and RAM usage can easily reach 1 GB or more using the current Windows app.
It’s unclear when Discord will fully move to Rust, but Vishnevskiy says the company “hopes to test it with users soon.”
Gn tech
