Discord migrates to Rust: New Phoenix client aims for speed

The Discord team is re-architecting its desktop and mobile clients by moving away from Electron and React Native. The entire client-side logic is being rewritten in Rust. This ambitious project, internally dubbed Phoenix, promises a more streamlined experience and is currently heading towards user testing.

• Transition from Electron and React Native to Rust.
• Desktop client to use GPUI for GPU-accelerated interface rendering.
• Impressive RAM efficiency: 290 MB with two active accounts in early tests.
• Native Linux client support and WebAssembly integration for web users.

Scaling performance with Rust Discord's decision to shift to Rust is a strategic move to tackle performance bottlenecks inherent in web-based frameworks. By adopting GPUI, a Rust-based framework originally developed by the Zed team, Discord aims to offload UI rendering to the GPU. This approach drastically reduces overhead and makes the desktop experience feel native and snappy across all platforms. ## Efficiency milestones CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy showcased the Phoenix build in the Windows Task Manager, revealing a memory footprint of just 290 MB while running two accounts. This is a massive improvement over the current Electron-based client. Additionally, mobile versions will share the Rust codebase, and the browser experience will utilize WebAssembly, ensuring a unified logic across all devices. ## Impact on the industry For the developer community and power users, this shift signifies a move away from resource-heavy web wrappers in favor of native performance. The upcoming release of a native Linux client will be particularly significant for power users. Discord continues its long-term investment in Rust, which began back in 2018, setting a high standard for cross-platform desktop applications.