If you’ve ever used Discord while PC gaming, you may have noticed that it’s a hungry little resource hog. That should all be set to change, though, as Discord is finally ditching Electron to rebuild the app in Rust.
While Discord has tried to reduce system usage with updates performance updates that disable animated banners while gaming, it still uses a lot of memory for what is just a chat service. However, the company is completely rebuilding the desktop app with a new focus on performance.
Discord chief technology officer Stanislav Vishnevskiy announced on social media that Discord will abandon Electron, the web-app technology it’s currently built on, for Rust. For the unaware, Rust is a modern programming language that Discord already uses for some services, but the low-memory focused programming language will now make up the bulk of the app.
“We’ve been early adopters of Rust since 2018 and a lot of our infra, voice tech, and even some of the current client is already Rust, the holy grail was getting the whole client there,” Vishnevskiy announced. “That means Electron goes away, and so does React Native, mobile keeps native UI but shares app code with desktop via Rust.”
Vishnevskiy showed an in-development image of the new Discord app’s performance on social media. In the image, the app is using just 290.2MB of memory. As fans who use the app know, Discord can easily take up over 1GB of RAM just from being in a video call, and it can use even more if you’re pinging between different servers.
It’s worth noting that we have no idea what the Discord app is doing in the image Vishnevskiy shared. A new account on the current platform doesn’t take up much memory at all, but as you join servers, join calls, share your screen, etc, it all leads to a very bloated, RAM-hungry experience.
There is currently no release date for the new Rust-led version of the app. However, Vishnevskiy explained that they “hope to get it into testing soon”. Even after tests begin, though, there’s no word on when it will rollout to all users.
Nevertheless, it’s clear that Discord is aware that things need to change for the app. As the service becomes more popular than ever, many have become disenfranchised with its shockingly poor performance as bloated features slow the app down even further.
As an app primarily targeting gamers, a low memory, fast performance requirement is essential for Discord. After all, everyone who uses the app pretty much always has a game open, and the more you use the app, the worse your game performs.
