Discord's Rust client boots past Electron and cuts RAM by about 70%

Discord has shown off a rebuilt desktop client written in Rust that reaches a loaded friends list before the current Electron app gets past its startup screen, while using roughly a third of the memory. According to Windows Latest, a 15-second side-by-side video posted on X by Discord co-founder and CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy had drawn 2.3 million views, and Discord staff confirmed both applications were launched from a cold start, not restored from the system tray.

A cold-start race

The clip, filmed on two Lenovo ThinkPads from 2024 or later running Windows 11, opens with the current Electron client first: it shows a blank dark window for around three seconds before displaying a loading tip. The Rust client was launched roughly a second and a half later, yet its window appeared within a second, and by the time the old app reached its interface about five seconds in, the new client had already rendered the friends list.

Sceptics on X suggested the new app had simply been popped out of the tray. Coral, who leads audio and video at Discord, pushed back, saying the launch was genuinely cold and that she initially assumed she had forgotten to close the app because it opened so quickly. Travis, the Discord community team member who filmed the clip, added that a tray launch would have shown the friends list already loaded.

The memory numbers, with caveats

Task Manager in the demo showed the new client, labelled Discord Phoenix, consuming 290.2MB of RAM. Vishnevskiy noted this was with two accounts signed in simultaneously, a concurrency feature the existing Account Switcher does not offer, since it can hold up to five accounts but swaps between them. Windows Latest reports that a Discord employee said in December 2025 that typical usage sits under 1GB, putting the new figure about 70% lower; on the outlet's own test machines the Electron app idles between 1GB and 2GB. These are snapshots from an early build, and Discord has not published a like-for-like benchmark of the two clients.

The company had also tried improving Electron itself: Windows Latest cites September patch notes where an Electron 42 upgrade cut median CPU usage by about 17% but caused a roughly 4% regression in median memory usage.

No more starting screen

The current client checks for updates behind a Starting modal that some users report waiting on for five to ten seconds. Coral explained that the new client bootstraps fast enough to drop the modal entirely and auto-updates in the background. Updates are not being handed to the Microsoft Store or the Windows Update Orchestration Platform.

GPUI, not Tauri or WinUI

Rather than Tauri, which keeps HTML, CSS and JavaScript rendering inside the system webview, Discord chose GPUI, a GPU-accelerated Rust UI framework from the makers of the Zed editor that draws the interface without any HTML. Discord, which has used Rust since 2018, carries its own patches on top and may push some upstream. Native webviews survive where they make sense: YouTube embeds and Activities will render in the system webview, an approach Vishnevskiy compared to Tauri. WinUI was likely ruled out for being Windows-only, while GPUI already runs on Windows, macOS and Linux; staff confirmed Linux support and heavy internal Mac use.

One Rust core across platforms

Mobile apps will keep native interfaces but drop React Native, sharing app logic with desktop through Rust, since the iOS app began on React Native and Android was ported to it for feature parity. The browser version will keep rendering HTML while its logic compiles to WebAssembly instead of JavaScript, letting the web client share the same Rust code. Vishnevskiy said the app looks and works identically to the current one.

Marketing director Ryan K. Rigney said the client enters private testing soon, with stability and security prioritised, while VP of Engineering Mark Smith stressed that accessibility and security matter as much as performance. Coral confirmed login tokens are stored in the system keyring, Credential Manager on Windows. No public release date has been announced.

Why it matters

Electron let Discord ship one desktop app across three platforms for a decade, at the cost of bundling a full Chromium engine in every install. A chat app used by millions has now demonstrated that the bundled browser can be dropped without a redesign, and Windows Latest argues the contrast is unflattering for other Electron holdouts like Teams and WhatsApp. The bigger signal is architectural: a shared Rust core spanning desktop, mobile and, via WebAssembly, the browser challenges the assumption that web technology is the only practical way to keep a large app in sync everywhere. The caveats are real, early numbers, a private-test roadmap and no independent benchmarks yet, but the direction of travel for cross-platform app development is now visibly on display.