🦀Discord's Rust Client Uses 70% Less RAM Than Its Electron App

Your Discord app's memory hog is about to get fired

Discord's Electron app is about to lose its job. The company is rebuilding the desktop client in Rust on GPUI, and in a side-by-side cold start test on two Lenovo ThinkPads running Windows 11, the new client showed its friends list before the old one got past its loading screen. If you run Discord alongside work tools, this matters. The new client can keep a work account and a personal account running at the same time without tearing down the client in between. It also skips the Starting screen and updates in the background, so you stop waiting on Microsoft Store or Windows update plumbing to get current. The numbers are the story. The current client usually idles at 1 to 2GB of RAM. The new one uses about 290.2MB with two accounts signed in, roughly 70% less. The client also keeps your login token in the system keyring and works on Linux. Mobile is moving off React Native and the web app is moving to WebAssembly, with logic in WASM and rendering still in HTML. The catch? There's no public release date yet. The new client goes into private testing soon and Discord says it will be stable and secure before it ships widely.