Discord Ditches Electron and React Native to Rewrite Everything in Rust!
The era of heavy desktop memory hogs is finally cracking as Discord boldly dumps its infamous resource-eating foundations for maximum speed and tiny RAM footprints.
Discord is actively building entirely new desktop and mobile clients from scratch, completely tossing out Electron on computers and React Native on smartphones in favor of Rust. The upcoming desktop app interface will run on GPUI, a GPU-accelerated Rust framework originally crafted by the Zed editor team, while system WebView handles embedded web goodies like mini-games and built-in activities, alongside a dedicated native client for Linux.
Meanwhile, the mobile apps for iOS and Android are getting native interfaces while sharing core business logic written in Rust with the desktop version, and web browsers will render the interface via standard HTML while executing core logic through WebAssembly. Stanislav Vishnevsky, CTO and co-founder of Discord, proudly flaunted a task manager screenshot of the test build dubbed Discord Phoenix showing a shockingly modest memory usage of just 290 megabytes while juggling two active accounts. Discord is no stranger to the language, having quietly trusted Rust for backend services like their read-state tracking since back in 2018.
Memory consumption dropping to human levels feels deeply suspicious, almost as if software engineers suddenly remembered computers have limited resources instead of infinite electron clouds to burn. The digital ecosystem continues its slow crawl back to performance sanity, proving that occasionally rewriting functional software out of sheer spite yields surprisingly decent results.
Source: Discord Blog
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