Discord Rebuilds Desktop and Mobile Client in Rust

Discord is rebuilding its desktop and mobile client in Rust, replacing Electron on desktop and React Native on mobile as it seeks to improve performance and reduce resource use. The company has not announced when the rewritten app will be available to the public. Discord cofounder and chief technology officer Stanislav Vishnevskiy described the change in a post on X. He said the company, which has used Rust in parts of its infrastructure and voice technology since 2018, is moving the whole client to the programming language. The mobile app will keep its native interface while sharing application code with desktop, he said. The experimental desktop build, named Discord Phoenix, uses GPUI for its interface, according to Vishnevskiy. He said it does not use Tauri. Electron, the framework used by Discord’s current desktop app, bundles web technologies with applications; Discord’s planned shift would replace that framework in the desktop client. A screenshot shared by Vishnevskiy showed the Windows build using about 290 MB of RAM. That figure is a snapshot, not a controlled comparison with the existing app under the same conditions. A separate demonstration described by a report...