Discord is rebuilding its desktop and mobile apps in Rust and dropping Electron, the web-based framework its desktop client runs on today, co-founder and CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy said on X on November 4. Nothing is available to try yet. There is no release date, and Vishnevskiy says only that Discord hopes to get the new app into testing with users soon.
Rust has been part of Discord since 2018, running a lot of its infrastructure and voice technology and even some of the current client, and Vishnevskiy called moving the whole client the "holy grail." Electron goes away on desktop and React Native on mobile, where Discord will keep native interfaces and share app code with desktop through Rust. The desktop interface will be drawn with GPUI, not Tauri, a Rust-based alternative that typically relies on a system webview. Vishnevskiy also says the new version "looks and works identically to the current one."
What the 290MB Figure Does and Doesn't Show
The figure behind most of the headlines comes from one Task Manager screenshot Vishnevskiy posted. It lists an app called Discord Phoenix at 290.2MB, next to Google Chrome at about 1.57GB, Steam's web helper at 856MB and Spotify at 653MB.
Image: Stanislav Vishnevskiy
That is a single reading from an early build, with no stated workload, and the screenshot does not show the current app on the same PC. So it is not a like-for-like comparison.
The 4GB number often set against it needs the same care. It is not typical use. It is the point at which Discord was testing an automatic restart of its Windows app in December 2025, when a Discord employee put normal usage under 1GB. Everyday use of the current app still varies: The Verge's Tom Warren says being in only a few servers can push it to 1GB or more.
Vishnevskiy says memory is only part of the story, claiming that clicking around "feels instant" and posting a side-by-side boot-time video on November 5. In that video, the new client is open while the current app is still on its loading screen. These are Discord's own demos, and independent tests will have to wait for a build people can install.
