If Discord is quietly eating a chunk of your RAM while you game, relief may be on the way. According to PC Gamer, Discord is moving its client entirely off Electron, the Chromium-based framework that lets JavaScript apps run as standalone desktop programs, and over to Rust. That Chromium foundation brings overhead, and Rust is meant to cut it. CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy has shown the new client using 290.2 MB while active. For comparison, PC Gamer's writer saw the current client hovering between 500 and 600 MB, and a colleague saw it climb to 785 MB on Windows.
Vishnevskiy explained that Discord has been using Rust since 2018 across its infrastructure, voice tech and parts of the existing client, and that "the holy grail was getting the whole client there." That means Electron and React Native both go away, with mobile keeping a native UI while sharing app code with desktop through Rust. Some expected Discord to use Tauri, but Vishnevskiy says the team is actually building on GPUI, a Rust framework, adding that "We have our own patches on top of it". The new client is also reportedly much quicker to boot: in a side-by-side demo on two laptops, the new version opened significantly faster, roughly six seconds versus one by PC Gamer's estimate.
There's no official date yet, only a goal of getting it into user testing soon, and all of these numbers come from Discord itself, so real-world results still need checking. Still, with memory prices pushing gaming gear costs up, a chat app that leaves more RAM for your actual games is a genuinely welcome change, and it lands alongside similar speed-ups for Epic and Steam.