Discord is rebuilding its apps in Rust, dropping Electron for a much faster client

Discord’s chat app, known for being slow to start and hungry for memory, is getting rebuilt from the ground up. The company has shown a new client written in Rust that drops Electron, the web-based framework the desktop app runs on today, and its own comparison videos show the new version starting much sooner.

Co-founder and CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy says Discord has used Rust since 2018 for its infrastructure, voice technology and parts of the current client, and moving the whole app over was the long-term goal:

The holy grail was getting the whole client there. That means Electron goes away, and so does React Native.

Stanislav Vishnevskiy, co-founder and CTO, Discord

On 5 November Discord’s official X account posted a clip of two identical Lenovo laptops, one with the app people use daily and one with the Rust build. On 6 November it repeated the test on a pair of budget Android phones. In 9to5Google’s reading of that video, the current app takes about 3 seconds to open and 2 more to finish loading, while the new one opens in under 1 second and is done before the 2-second mark.

Phones get a slightly different recipe. The Android app keeps native interface elements, but its logic comes from the same Rust code as the desktop app; Vishnevskiy says the approach was inspired by React Native, and that the desktop side uses the GPUI framework rather than Tauri. For an app many people keep open next to a game all evening, a launch that drops from seconds to under one is the kind of change users feel straight away.

What Discord hasn’t given is a date. Vishnevskiy only says the team hopes to get the new client into testing with users soon.

Reported by Discord on X, Discord on X (desktop), Stanislav Vishnevskiy on X, 9to5Google. Compiled with AI tools.