Discord is rebuilding its desktop and mobile apps from scratch in Rust, dropping the Electron framework that has powered its desktop client for years. Co-founder and chief technology officer Stanislav Vishnevskiy confirmed the plan on 4 November, calling a fully native client the company's long-held goal.

An early Windows build, codenamed Discord Phoenix, appeared in a screenshot shared by Vishnevskiy showing Task Manager listing the app at 290.2MB of memory while signed in to two accounts at once. By comparison, the same screenshot showed Google Chrome using 1,568.6MB across 19 processes. TalkEsport reports the new client runs as a single process, with no child processes.

The desktop interface is being built with GPUI, the GPU-accelerated interface framework created by the team behind the Zed code editor, rather than Tauri, which many users had guessed. Vishnevskiy said the rebuilt app looks and works identically to the current one, and supports using two accounts at the same time, including sitting in voice channels on both.

Mobile is part of the same plan. React Native is also being dropped, with the phone apps keeping their native interfaces while sharing application code with desktop through Rust. Some embedded content, such as YouTube videos and Activities, will still use the system webview.

Discord has used Rust in production since 2018, including in its infrastructure and voice technology, but the full client remained out of reach until now. The company has given no release date, saying only that it hopes to put the new client into testing with users soon. Until then, the current Electron app remains the only version available.