Discord is moving its apps fully over to the Rust programming language.Discord is moving its apps fully over to the Rust programming language.Nov 5, 2026, 11:39 AM UTCIllustration by Alex Castro / The VergeDiscord is finally giving up on Electron, the cross-platform framework that lets developers build desktop apps using web technologies. Electron web apps are notoriously heavy on system resources, and Discord is now moving its desktop app fully to Rust — a modern programming language designed for speed and memory safety.“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,” explains Discord chief technology officer Stanislav Vishnevskiy in a post on X. “That means Electron goes away, and so does React Native, mobile keeps native UI but shares app code with desktop via Rust.”Vishnevskiy also shared an image of the Discord Windows client using just 290MB of RAM, which is a clear improvement as you only have to participate in a few servers and RAM usage can easily hit 1GB or more using the current Windows app.It’s not clear when Discord will make the full switch over to Rust, but Vishnevskiy says the company “hope to get it into testing with users soon.”Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.Tom WarrenThe Verge DailyA free daily digest of the news that matters most.Email (required)By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy. We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Discord is ditching Electron and its new app uses less RAM
