Discord using less of your memory would be good news for anyone gaming on a PC with RAM to spare and better news for anyone without it. The catch is that there's nothing to install yet, and every figure for the new client comes from the person building it.
Discord co-founder and CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy said on X on November 4 that the whole app is being rebuilt in the Rust programming language, Inven Global reports. Electron goes on desktop, React Native goes on mobile. Discord hasn't published an announcement of its own, Inven says, and the X posts couldn't be checked directly, so his words here are as PC Gamer, Inven and 9to5Google reported them.
What's actually changing
Electron is the framework that lets web-style apps run as desktop programs, and PC Gamer notes it's built on Chromium, which brings overhead that a move to Rust aims to remove. Vishnevskiy said the "holy grail" was getting the whole client onto Rust, according to PC Gamer. Mobile keeps its native interface but shares app code with desktop.
If you're expecting a new look, don't. "The app looks and works identically to the current one," Vishnevskiy said, as quoted by Inven. Some users had guessed it would use Tauri, but PC Gamer and Inven report he said it uses GPUI, with Discord's own patches on top.
This also isn't Discord's first go with the language. PC Gamer quotes Vishnevskiy saying Discord has been an early adopter since 2018, and that a lot of its infrastructure, its voice technology and some of the current client are already Rust.
What the demos show
There are three sets of claims, and they're worth separating.
- Memory on PC: a Task Manager screenshot Vishnevskiy shared showed a process called Discord Phoenix using 290.2 MB, while running two accounts at once, Inven reports. For comparison, PC Gamer's writer saw the current client between 500 and 600 MB, and a colleague saw 785 MB. 9to5Google reported about 1,200 MB for the current PC client.
- Boot time on PC: Vishnevskiy showed two laptops, one with each client, and PC Gamer's own rough count was six seconds for the old client against one for the new.
- Android: in a video on two older, low-end phones that 9to5Google says look like Samsung A-series models, it reports the current client took about three seconds to launch and about two more to fully load. The new one launched in under a second and finished before the two-second mark.
That comparison range tells you something on its own. Discord's memory use varies a lot from one PC to the next, so a single screenshot can't tell you what your saving would be. PC Gamer's caveat is blunter: this is coming from the company, and it wants to get the client in hand to see how much faster and more efficient it really is. Vishnevskiy's own wording on performance, as Inven quotes it, is measured: "We expect it to be better."
What to do about it
Nothing, for now. Vishnevskiy said the aim is to get the new client "into testing with users soon," and no date has been given.
If Discord's memory use is what's hurting your games today, this isn't a reason to hold off on any decision. It's a promising demo of an unreleased app. PC Gamer puts Discord alongside Epic and Steam, which are also getting faster, and it says the memory crisis keeps driving up the price of gaming gear.
Android users may have the most to gain. Inven says the Android app moved to React Native a couple of years ago because it kept lagging behind on features, and 9to5Google quotes Vishnevskiy saying, "We didn't forget about mobile, especially Android." Nobody outside the company has published results yet in these reports, so hold your judgement until testers have it on their own phones.
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