Discord Rebuilds Its Apps in Rust and Drops Electron

Discord is rebuilding its desktop and mobile applications in Rust, replacing Electron on desktop and React Native on phones. Co-founder and CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy confirmed the plan on November 4

The desktop client uses GPUI, a GPU-accelerated Rust interface framework from the creators of Zed. Discord has made its own changes to the framework. Vishnevskiy said the team would consider contributing relevant patches upstream.

The rewrite aims to preserve the app’s current appearance and behavior. Embedded experiences such as YouTube and Activities still use the operating system’s webview. On mobile, Discord plans to retain native interfaces while sharing application code with desktop through Rust.

A Windows Task Manager screenshot showed a development build named Discord Phoenix using 290.2 MB of memory. Vishnevskiy said the build was running two accounts simultaneously. The screenshot shows one development configuration, without a controlled comparison against the existing client. Discord has not published comparative performance benchmarks for the rewrite.

Rust already handles parts of Discord’s infrastructure, voice technology, and existing client. The company previously described a narrower migration in its February 2020 engineering report: moving the Read States service from Go to Rust. This service tracks which messages and channels users have read. Engineers traced recurring latency spikes to garbage collection and reported improvements after the migration.

The current project extends Rust across the client applications. The earlier backend results describe a different workload and do not establish performance gains for the new desktop or mobile apps.

Vishnevskiy said Discord hopes to begin user testing soon.