Popular messaging app Discord is working on a full port of its desktop app to the Rust programming language, moving away from the Electron framework that has been criticized for hogging RAM for years.
Popular messaging app Discord is working on a full port of its desktop app to the Rust programming language, moving away from the Electron framework that has been criticized for hogging RAM for years.
This was announced by Discord CTO Stanislav Vishnevsky in his post on the X network (Twitter).
According to Vishnevsky, the company has been systematically moving towards this decision for several years.
“We started using Rust back in 2018, and a significant part of our infrastructure, voice technologies, and even part of the current client are already written in Rust; our main goal was to port the entire client there. This means that Electron is a thing of the past, as is React Native; the mobile version retains the native interface, but uses common code with the desktop version thanks to Rust,” the CTO explained.
The main advantage of the new client will be a significant optimization of system resources. Vishnevsky published a screenshot of the Windows version of Discord, which consumes only 290 MB of RAM. For comparison, the current version of the application on Electron can take up 1 GB of RAM even when only being on a few servers.
The company has not yet announced the exact dates for the full release of the updated client, but they note that public testing with users should begin in the near future.
Discord already has a successful track record of migrating to Rust. Back in 2020, the company detailed in its blog how it migrated its read receipt service from Go to Rust. At the time, the Go service was experiencing regular delays due to the garbage collector scanning a huge cache of tens of millions of items. Moving to Rust without this mechanism allowed it to instantly free up memory, eliminate latency spikes, and significantly improve the performance of the entire platform.
