Discord is ditching Electron and its new app uses less RAM
- ID
- 43571
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 05 Nov 2026, 9:05 PM
- Fetched
- 06 Nov 2026, 5:25 AM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://www.theverge.com/news/1027379/discord-ditching-electron-web-app
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 6.5
- Created
- 06 Nov 2026, 5:25 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersvibe_coders
What happened
Discord is moving its desktop client fully to Rust, dropping both Electron and React Native, per CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy in a post on X. Vishnevskiy shared a screenshot of the Windows client running at 290MB of RAM, versus the 1GB+ that the current Electron-based app can reach with a few servers joined; no release date was given, only that the team hopes to get it into user testing soon. Mobile keeps its native UI but will share app code with desktop through Rust, and Discord says it has been using Rust in infrastructure and voice tech since 2018.
Why it matters
The useful detail is the timeline, not the RAM number: Discord has been on Rust since 2018 and is only now close to testing a full client rewrite, so treat this as an eight-year migration story rather than a reason to abandon Electron this quarter. If you ship a desktop app, the decision to weigh is whether a Rust client buys you shared code with mobile and a ~3-4x memory reduction worth that runway — the article gives no shipped build, no date, and no migration cost to benchmark against.
Discussion angle
If the 290MB figure holds, is memory the real driver for a Rust rewrite, or is the bigger win sharing one codebase between desktop and mobile — and at what team size does that trade-off stop paying off?