It looks like Discord will soon be less memory-hungry
Discord is ditching Electron – A full Rust rewrite is in the works
Discord Co-founder Stanislav Vishnevskiy confirmed that Discord is moving away from Electron and rewriting its app in Rust, with GPUI handling the desktop interface. While that sentence might not mean much to most Discord users, it is a big deal, especially if you dislike how much memory/RAM Discord uses.
In a post on X, Stanislav showcased the new version of Discord, called “Discord Phoenix”, using less than 300MB of RAM. On Windows, Discord is well known for being a memory hog, especially for users in many servers with many active chats. In fact, Discord has an auto-restart function that restarts the app when it starts using more than 4GB of RAM. That’s an insane amount of memory for a chat app.
By ditching Electron and building a new Rust-based client, Discord should run much more efficiently. Discord is currently testing its new Rust-based version internally, but hopes to start testing it with users soon.
Discord’s memory-hogging nature is an especially bad thing in 2026
Let’s face it, many basic Windows apps have become RAM hogs. Too many apps are web-apps based on Electron and Chromium, glorified web browsers that eat memory and operate much less efficiently than native applications. With DRAM pricing more than 5x what it was this time last year, app developers can no longer expect users to simply deal with excessive memory usage. DRAM is a premium commodity, and app developers shouldn’t waste it.
Discord’s move to Rust should make the application much less resource-heavy. Hopefully we will see other applications follow suit by releasing more efficient, less resource-intensive versions. WhatsApp and Teams: a change is needed…
Microsoft has also been working to tackle unnecessary memory use with recent Windows 11 updates. Microsoft has claimed significant performance gains on 8GB Windows PCs this year. The company also plans to optimise its own applications and OS elements to boost performance and decrease memory utilisation. Let’s hope that more app makers follow suit.
Join the discussion on Discord’s move from Electron to Rust on the OC3D Forums.
