Discord to rebuild desktop and mobile apps in Rust with GPUI

Discord's co-founder and CTO, Stanislav Vishnevskiy, said on 5 November that the company will rebuild its desktop and mobile clients as native applications written in Rust, according to automaton-media.com.

The new clients will use GPUI, a Rust GUI framework that draws directly with the GPU rather than through a browser engine, replacing the Electron framework used by the current desktop app. On mobile, Discord plans to keep a native interface while sharing code with the desktop version through Rust.

Vishnevskiy said the company aims to put the rebuilt clients into user testing soon. A screenshot attached to his post showed Discord running at about 290MB of memory.

Years of Rust inside Discord

Discord's mobile apps are currently built with React Native for both iOS and Android. Vishnevskiy has said the company began adopting Rust around 2018, and that its infrastructure, voice technology and parts of the client are already written in Rust.

Some users had asked Discord to move to Tauri, a Rust framework that uses the operating system's WebView instead of bundling Chromium. On 3 November, Vishnevskiy replied to users on X that Discord would not adopt Tauri and hinted at moving away from Chromium, and some in the community predicted GPUI would be chosen.

Electron became widespread in the late 2010s for cross-platform desktop apps but is known for large app size and memory use; Visual Studio Code and Slack still use it. Discord has sometimes used between 500MB and just under 1GB of memory under normal conditions.