Discord Is Rebuilding Its Desktop Client in Rust

Discord is preparing to move away from Electron. Co-founder and CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy has confirmed that the company is rebuilding its desktop client in Rust, with GPUI powering the interface.

An early Windows 11 screenshot identifies the new application as Discord Phoenix and shows it using only 290.2MB of RAM.

Many popular Windows 11 applications—including Outlook, Teams, WhatsApp, and Discord—rely on resource-intensive technologies such as Electron and WebView2. Electron has been particularly controversial because it allows companies to package web-based applications and distribute them across multiple platforms with relatively little additional development work.

The Current Discord Client Can Consume Gigabytes of RAM

Unlike WebView-based applications, which can share resources with MS Edge, each Electron application includes its own copy of Chromium. Discord’s installation directory inside the Windows AppData folder contains Chromium-related components and supporting files.

Similar files can be found in the installation directories of browsers such as MS Edge and Brave, as well as Electron-based applications including Facebook Messenger.

Electron applications do not necessarily consume several gigabytes of memory, but Discord is among the more resource-intensive examples. The application can use between 1GB and 2GB of RAM while running in the background, even when it is idle.

Memory consumption can continue to rise as users open servers and interact with the application. Discord has acknowledged that its Windows client can reach 4GB of RAM. In response, the company tested automatically restarting the client whenever memory usage exceeded that threshold, although this was only a temporary workaround rather than a complete solution.

In December 2025, a Discord employee confirmed that the company was testing restarts when memory consumption surpassed 4GB, while noting that normal usage should remain below 1GB. The company also reported that some users were seeing lower memory usage than before and that its 95th-percentile memory measurement had improved by approximately 5%.

Discord said its investigation uncovered additional issues involving platform, operating system, driver, and hardware layers. It worked with relevant partners to provide reproducible test cases and develop fixes.

The early results from Discord Phoenix appear promising, although direct testing will be necessary to determine how its performance compares with the existing Electron client.

Rust and GPUI Will Replace Electron

Vishnevskiy recently indicated that a major desktop client update was in development and confirmed that it would no longer rely on Electron or Chromium.

He explained that Discord has used Rust since 2018 across its infrastructure, voice technology, and portions of the existing client. Rebuilding the entire client in Rust has remained the company’s broader objective.

According to Vishnevskiy, the transition means that Electron and React Native will be removed. Discord’s mobile applications will retain native interfaces while sharing application code with the desktop client through Rust.

He also confirmed that Discord is using GPUI rather than Tauri. This distinction is important because Tauri, while supporting Rust, generally displays web interfaces through an operating system webview. The use of GPUI confirms that Discord is not simply replacing Electron with another webview-based framework.

The redesigned client is also expected to eliminate Discord’s current “Starting” screen. Because it will no longer need to load Electron libraries during launch, the new application should offer faster startup times.