Discord is ditching Electron and its new app uses less RAM

Discord is ditching Electron, the cross-platform framework that allows developers to build desktop apps using web technologies, and is moving its desktop app fully to Rust, a modern programming language designed for speed and memory safety. The move aims to reduce system resource usage, as Electron apps are notoriously heavy on system resources. The company has been using Rust since 2018 and has already converted some of its infrastructure, voice technology, and client to the language. The new app will share code with mobile apps, but mobile will keep a native user interface. The company hopes to test the new app with users soon, but a timeline for the full switch is unclear. An image of the new Windows client shows it using 290MB of RAM, a significant improvement over the current app which can consume up to 1GB of RAM when participating in multiple servers.