Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord just showed why

Your Discord app will now launch faster and use substantially less RAM.

Discord has unveiled a new desktop client built with Rust, demonstrating a significant performance improvement over its previous Electron-based application. In a side-by-side comparison, the new Rust client launched and loaded its friends list while the older Electron app was still displaying a "Starting" screen. Discord's CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy shared a video of this demonstration, which gained significant traction online. The new client, codenamed Discord Phoenix, uses approximately 290.2MB of RAM even with two accounts signed in, which is reportedly 70% less than the Electron version, which often idles at 1-2GB. This performance leap is attributed to Discord's adoption of GPUI, a GPU-accelerated UI framework for Rust, rather than relying on Electron's Chromium-based architecture. The company also confirmed that the new client updates in the background and does not rely on the Microsoft Store for updates. Discord's mobile apps are also being updated, moving away from React Native to share more code with the desktop client through Rust, and the web app will use WebAssembly for its logic. The new client is slated for private testing soon, with a focus on stability, security, and accessibility.

Discord's move away from Electron and toward a custom Rust-based UI framework, GPUI, signals a broader industry trend of developers prioritizing native performance and resource efficiency over the convenience of cross-platform web technologies. This decision, driven by substantial gains in boot time and RAM usage, suggests that applications with complex UIs and high user engagement may find Electron's overhead increasingly untenable. The company's concurrent updates to mobile and web platforms, aiming for code sharing via Rust and WebAssembly, further indicate a strategic shift towards a unified, performance-optimized architecture across all their services.

The implications for competing messaging and collaboration platforms like WhatsApp and Microsoft Teams, which still rely on web technologies for their desktop interfaces, are significant. Discord's demonstrated ability to achieve near-native performance without resorting to platform-specific frameworks like WinUI suggests that users may begin expecting similar efficiency from all their daily-use applications. As more companies explore Rust and native UI solutions, the performance gap between traditional Electron apps and newer alternatives will likely widen, potentially influencing user choices and driving further innovation in the desktop application space.