--- title: Discord's Rust rewrite just made Electron look slow description: Discord's upcoming desktop client, codenamed Phoenix, loads its friends list almost instantly on cold start, while the current Electron app takes about five... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/discord-s-rust-rewrite-just-made-electron-look-slow-p0vsr7g4c twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Discord's Rust rewrite just made Electron look slow | daily.dev og:description: Discord's upcoming desktop client, codenamed Phoenix, loads its friends list almost instantly on cold start, while the current Electron app takes about five... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/discord-s-rust-rewrite-just-made-electron-look-slow-p0vsr7g4c og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/P0Vsr7g4C.png og:image:alt: Discord's Rust rewrite just made Electron look slow og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Discord's Rust rewrite just made Electron look slow **[Trends](https://daily.dev/sources/trends)** · 2 min read · 59 upvotes · 11 comments ## Summary Discord's upcoming desktop client, codenamed Phoenix, loads its friends list almost instantly on cold start, while the current Electron app takes about five seconds. The early build uses 290.2MB of RAM with two accounts signed in, versus under 1GB for the normal Windows app, roughly 70% less. It's built on GPUI, the GPU-accelerated Rust UI framework from the Zed editor team, not Tauri. Discord is also dropping React Native on mobile for shared Rust code and moving the web client's logic to WebAssembly. The client is heading into private testing with no public release date yet. ## Content Discord's new desktop client opens, and its friends list is already there while the current Electron app is still thinking about it. That's the clip CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy shared: a cold start where Rust renders almost instantly and Electron takes about five seconds. The 'Starting' update screen is gone too. The number everyone is repeating is memory. The early build (codenamed Phoenix) sits at 290.2MB of RAM with two accounts signed in at once. Discord's normal Windows usage runs under 1GB, so that's roughly 70% less. ## The pile-on has started Windows Latest went furthest, headlining that every Windows 11 app should kill Electron and that Discord just showed why. On X, @ycnewsdigest went straight to the funeral: "The Electron era is ending." Justin Searls had the driest take. Rust is "finally taking off," he joked, now that it has overcome the barrier of having to learn, write, or engage with anything about Rust. It's a good line, and it points at the real tension: plenty of people cheer this kind of result while never touching the language that produced it. ## Not the Tauri story The detail that gets lost in the Electron-killer framing is what Discord actually picked. It isn't Tauri. The client is built on GPUI, the GPU-accelerated Rust UI framework from the makers of the Zed editor. That means Discord is drawing its own UI rather than wrapping a webview in a thinner shell. The rewrite also doesn't stop at desktop: - Mobile drops React Native for shared Rust code, with native UI on top. - The web client will use WebAssembly instead of JavaScript for its logic. So this is a full rewrite of the core, not a desktop-only experiment. ## What's still unknown The client goes into private testing soon, and Discord hasn't given a public release date. Everything above comes from an early build and a cold-start video, which is the best case for any rewrite. Memory with two accounts looks great; the open question is whether it holds up after months of real-world features, plugins and weird edge cases. Still, a company that ships to hundreds of millions of people just bet its whole stack on Rust. That will get noticed by every team currently defending its Electron app in a planning meeting. ## Questions this post answers ### How much RAM does Discord's new Rust-based desktop client use compared to the current Electron app? The early Rust build, codenamed Phoenix, uses 290.2MB of RAM with two accounts signed in simultaneously. Discord's normal Windows Electron client typically uses under 1GB, making the new build roughly 70% lighter on memory. This figure comes from an early private build, so it may change before any public release. _Weighing a move off Electron for memory reasons? daily.dev surfaces real-world framework comparisons as they emerge._ ### What UI framework is Discord using for its new Rust desktop client instead of Tauri? Discord's new client is built on GPUI, the GPU-accelerated Rust UI framework created by the team behind the Zed code editor. This means Discord draws its own UI directly rather than wrapping a webview, which is the approach Tauri takes, distinguishing it from most other Electron alternatives. _Comparing Rust UI frameworks before picking one? daily.dev tracks how tools like GPUI and Tauri evolve._ ### Is Discord rewriting its mobile and web apps in Rust too, or just the desktop client? The rewrite covers all three platforms. Desktop uses GPUI for native rendering, mobile drops React Native in favor of shared Rust code with native UI on top, and the web client will run its logic through WebAssembly instead of JavaScript. The client has not been given a public release date and is entering private testing. _Tracking cross-platform Rust adoption? daily.dev keeps developers current on stack migrations like this one._ ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 191 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-11-07). **TL;DR:** Most commenters agree Electron's resource bloat is a real, long-known problem and welcome Discord's Rust/GPUI rewrite, but many push back on the framing that this is purely a new idea or that native toolkits were ever truly unavailable, and there's substantial debate over accessibility, cross-platform tradeoffs, and whether alternatives like Qt or Slint were always viable. **Sentiment:** 20% positive · 25% mixed · 55% skeptical **The case for** - The Rust/GPUI approach could meaningfully cut memory and startup-time bloat compared to Electron. - LLMs now make building and maintaining native, per-platform apps far less costly than when Electron first became popular. - Discord's new stack (GPUI + shared Rust + WASM) is seen as an elegant way to unify desktop, mobile, and web without Electron's overhead. **The pushback** - Electron's value was cross-platform development with one team and minimal effort, which the article doesn't really address. - Accessibility features are much harder to replicate well in native/cross-platform UI toolkits, and switching away from web tech risks losing them. - Native alternatives like Qt or Slint have existed for a long time, making claims that Electron was the only option at the time overstated. - GPUI itself is tightly coupled to Zed's needs, lacks official crates.io releases, and has an unstable API/ecosystem. **By community** - hackernews (heated): Discussion splits sharply between people defending Electron as a pragmatic historical solution and others who call it a straight-up bad choice, with long side-debates on accessibility, Qt/Java alternatives, and whether LLMs now change the cost-benefit calculus. **Hottest debate:** Whether Electron was ever actually a reasonable engineering tradeoff or always just a lazy shortcut that harmed users, with accessibility cited by both sides. **Open questions** - Can native or lightweight Rust-based UI frameworks match the accessibility support that web-based apps like Electron provide? - Will GPUI mature into a general-purpose, stable framework outside of Zed's own needs? - Does the new Rust/WASM approach actually extend to all platforms (mobile, web, tablets) as claimed, or will porting still require significant extra work? **Highlights** > The electron hate train needs to pull in to the station and be retired. We can just admit that it was a good solution for the problems of its time just like JQuery. Electron was conceived over a decade ago and it was an imperfect solution, but there’s no denying that it was a solution. Election predates WebAssembly by 5 years and hit the scene only one year after Rust was first created. And just like JQuery, its time is coming to a close as better frameworks are available now that weren’t available back then. > — [Grombobulous on hackernews · 6 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50404434) > A huge pain of desktop development is managing dependencies particularly if you are coming from C++/Native code. Imagine you wanted to make a simple app in the 2010s that accesses the webcam for instance: If you use chrome you got the full html5 runtime, whereas with other tools you'd need bespoke libraries which your end user may not have. The only way to ship the same code between linux, macOS, and Windows would have been to either use something like Qt or the JVM back in the 2010s. The JVM desktop stuff was super ugly and Java itself had become notorious (also if you wanted anything remotely interesting like webcam/microphone or multimedia access you'd still have to ship dynamic libraries). Qt required special packaging skills to ship to the end user especially if third party libraries were involved. Electron killed that by bundling chrome (and chrome has a huge api surface). Today, I would argue the package management situation for a language like rust is a lot different. You dont have to cobble different DLLs together, you can just statically compile dependencies and cargo/rust do a pretty good job of making sure it's bundled with your app. Other languages also now have similarly useful tools. > — [accurrent on hackernews · 3 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50404501) > GPUI works well for Zed, but it's built for Zed's needs only. There is no official crates.io udates. Breaking changes land as Zed needs them, and outside PRs often get declined causing a mess of several forks. > — [jenadine on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50405206) > I don't understand this idiocracy - it's super easy (I did myself alone many times) to have a single codebase in Qt for all OSes, even BSDs. I think people become super lazy... "Ah, it's will ocupie a few hundreds of RAM, no problem, let's ship it." They are companies with billions or even trillions shipping shit with Electron. > — [mococa on hackernews · 3 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50404805) > > This article does nothing to address that. This has been addressed many times now, and the article doesn't really need to re-address it. Coding LLMs make managing cross-platform native apps significantly easier than it was in the past. The cost-reward analysis, where Electron and simile apps made sense because then you don't need to have an iOS expert, a macOS expert, etc, and having a bloated monstrosity of an app is an acceptable compromise, is simply no longer true. I know there is some subset of HN that still thinks CoPilot 2024 is the state of the art and will declare this a foolish assertion that good developers like them disbelieve, but this is what all of the industry is moving to. > — [llm\_nerd on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50409037) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50403507) · 183 points · 191 comments ## Community discussion Top comments from developers on daily.dev. **@akkitto** · 7 upvotes > Basically anything makes Electron look slow... **@nanomicon** · 5 upvotes > Electron has always been slow… **@andrewma** · 4 upvotes > yessss. 2gb to 290 mb i believe I saw in another post **@skepagent** · 2 upvotes > The GPUI choice is the interesting part — 290MB is a clean two-account build, not months of real-world use with plugins and screen share. Curious how accessibility holds up once the web-based UI is gone. **@arslana4** · 1 upvotes > The cold start number is the impressive one, memory is the easy headline. But what I'd want to see is the same benchmark a year from now... a lot of Electron apps were fast at launch too, the bloat came from five years of features and plugins piling up. Rust buys you a better floor, it doesn't stop a team from building a slow app on top of it. Still, 70% less RAM for an app most people leave open all day is a real win ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [6 fast \(native\) alternatives for VSCode](https://daily.dev/posts/6-fast-native-alternatives-for-vscode-fe1b5d70y) · LogRocket · 69 upvotes · 17 comments - [A 30,000-line Rust GPU engine on Expo, and 120,000 installs without ads](https://daily.dev/posts/a-30-000-line-rust-gpu-engine-on-expo-and-120-000-installs-without-ads-guctqmtmu) · Expo Blog · 12 upvotes · 0 comments - [Electron vs. Tauri](https://daily.dev/posts/electron-vs-tauri-24hpt0fb7) · Lobsters · 1 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#rust](https://daily.dev/tags/rust), [#discord](https://daily.dev/tags/discord), [#electron](https://daily.dev/tags/electron) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/discord-s-rust-rewrite-just-made-electron-look-slow-p0vsr7g4c) ```json 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slow…","datePublished":"2026-11-08T00:26:45.741Z","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/P0Vsr7g4C#c-0Q6L4sX44","author":{"@type":"Person","name":"Daniel","url":"https://daily.dev/akkitto","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--FtwJqX4c--/f_auto/v1754900041/avatars/avatar_29TCpY2hJR72V3BlxPXzX?_a=BAMClqZW0"},"interactionStatistic":{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":7}},{"@type":"Comment","text":"Electron has always been slow…","datePublished":"2026-11-08T01:16:18.172Z","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/P0Vsr7g4C#c-IK7PXQNAD","author":{"@type":"Person","name":"NaN","url":"https://daily.dev/nanomicon","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--xttHtmey--/f_auto/v1768615042/avatars/avatar_0Pwgxd8JXDKz1ZziWduWY?_a=BAMAMiiu0"},"interactionStatistic":{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":5}},{"@type":"Comment","text":"yessss. 2gb to 290 mb i believe I saw in another post","datePublished":"2026-11-08T01:24:13.372Z","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/P0Vsr7g4C#c-w2voPucpk","author":{"@type":"Person","name":"Andrew M","url":"https://daily.dev/andrewma","image":"https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/102819214?v=4"},"interactionStatistic":{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":4}},{"@type":"Comment","text":"The GPUI choice is the interesting part — 290MB is a clean two-account build, not months of real-world use with plugins and screen share. Curious how accessibility holds up once the web-based UI is gone.","datePublished":"2026-11-08T02:49:26.212Z","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/P0Vsr7g4C#c-Rv86WVxO4","author":{"@type":"Person","name":"kris gu","url":"https://daily.dev/skepagent","image":"https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/a/ACg8ocJnnwFKNx7PJNhb7W6mFWr2k2SV_VHW_9ainY71DX_dv79frQ=s96-c"},"interactionStatistic":{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":2}},{"@type":"Comment","text":"The cold start number is the impressive one, memory is the easy headline. But what I’d want to see is the same benchmark a year from now… a lot of Electron apps were fast at launch too, the bloat came from five years of features and plugins piling up. Rust buys you a better floor, it doesn’t stop a team from building a slow app on top of it. Still, 70% less RAM for an app most people leave open all day is a real win","datePublished":"2026-11-08T03:02:13.028Z","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/P0Vsr7g4C#c-DWaJlr4JY","author":{"@type":"Person","name":"Arslan Ahmad","url":"https://daily.dev/arslana4","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--uqaKkLUk--/f_auto,q_auto/v1/avatars/avatar_eaY5cld3PAQk2zpphnPSN"},"interactionStatistic":{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":1}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"FAQPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/discord-s-rust-rewrite-just-made-electron-look-slow-p0vsr7g4c#faq","mainEntity":[{"@type":"Question","name":"How much RAM does Discord's new Rust-based desktop client use compared to the current Electron app?","acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"The early Rust build, codenamed Phoenix, uses 290.2MB of RAM with two accounts signed in simultaneously. Discord's normal Windows Electron client typically uses under 1GB, making the new build roughly 70% lighter on memory. This figure comes from an early private build, so it may change before any public release. Weighing a move off Electron for memory reasons? daily.dev surfaces real-world framework comparisons as they emerge."}},{"@type":"Question","name":"What UI framework is Discord using for its new Rust desktop client instead of Tauri?","acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"Discord's new client is built on GPUI, the GPU-accelerated Rust UI framework created by the team behind the Zed code editor. This means Discord draws its own UI directly rather than wrapping a webview, which is the approach Tauri takes, distinguishing it from most other Electron alternatives. Comparing Rust UI frameworks before picking one? daily.dev tracks how tools like GPUI and Tauri evolve."}},{"@type":"Question","name":"Is Discord rewriting its mobile and web apps in Rust too, or just the desktop client?","acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"The rewrite covers all three platforms. Desktop uses GPUI for native rendering, mobile drops React Native in favor of shared Rust code with native UI on top, and the web client will run its logic through WebAssembly instead of JavaScript. The client has not been given a public release date and is entering private testing. Tracking cross-platform Rust adoption? daily.dev keeps developers current on stack migrations like this one."}}]} ```