Discord is quietly killing one of Windows 11’s most notorious RAM hogs. Co-founder and CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy has confirmed the company is rebuilding its desktop client in Rust, and the resulting Discord Rust rebuild is already showing memory usage at just 290.2MB — a fraction of the up-to-4GB footprint the current Electron app can reach.
Here’s everything we know about the new client, dubbed “Discord Phoenix,” and why it matters for anyone running Discord on Windows.
Discord’s RAM problem
The current Discord Windows app is built on Electron, the framework that packages a website with its own private copy of Chromium. Unlike Microsoft’s WebView2, which shares resources with the Edge browser, every Electron app ships its own browser engine — which is why the Discord folder in your AppData directory is packed with Chromium and Chrome files.
The result is a resource appetite that has made Discord one of the worst offenders on Windows 11. In practice, I’ve seen Discord sit at 1–2GB of RAM even while idle, and that number climbs as you open servers and keep the app running.
Discord itself has admitted the problem. The company acknowledged that its Windows app can reach 4GB of RAM, and it quietly rolled out a test that restarts the client when memory usage exceeds that threshold.
“Yes, we’re testing a restart when memory exceeds 4GB (normal usage is <1GB),” a Discord employee wrote in a Reddit post in December 2025, as spotted by Windows Latest.
The company noted a 5% reduction in p95 memory at that time, adding that it “uncovered issues upstream at the platform/OS/driver/hardware level, and we’ve worked closely with partners to provide stand-alone repros and ultimately fixes.” Those were stopgaps, though — not a real fix.
The Discord Rust rebuild
Over the past few days, Vishnevskiy has been dropping hints that a major update to the desktop client was coming, and that it would not be based on Electron or Chromium.
In a post on X, as first spotted by Windows Latest, Vishnevskiy spelled out the plan:
“We’ve been early adopters of Rust since 2018 and a lot of our infra, voice tech, and even some of the current client is already Rust, the holy grail was getting the whole client there.”
He confirmed the broader implications: “That means Electron goes away, and so does React Native, mobile keeps native UI but shares app code with desktop via Rust.”
Notably, he ruled out the two most common Rust-based frameworks people guessed at. “And it’s not Tauri, it’s GPUI, so good guess everyone.”
GPUI is a full native GUI toolkit, which is a meaningful distinction. Tauri, by contrast, typically renders a web interface through the operating system’s webview — so choosing Rust alone wouldn’t tell you whether Discord was keeping a web-based UI. Confirming GPUI means the interface is being built natively, not on top of a browser engine.
The early Windows 11 screenshot shared by Discord shows the new “Discord Phoenix” client using just 290.2MB of RAM. Windows Latest also understands that the app will no longer launch with the “Starting” screen, since it won’t have to load Electron libraries first.
What this means for you
If you run Discord on Windows 11, the payoff is straightforward: dramatically less RAM consumed by the app, especially if you keep it running in the background across multiple servers. For users on machines with limited memory, or anyone who’s watched their RAM tank just from having Discord open, this is the kind of change that’s immediately noticeable day to day.
It’s also a signal about where desktop software is heading. Electron has dominated because it’s far easier to package a website and ship it across platforms, but the memory and CPU costs have become harder to justify as devices get more demanding. A native Rust + GPUI rebuild is Discord betting that the performance gains are worth the engineering effort.
How to get it
As of now, the Rust rebuild is still in early stages — the screenshot is an early Windows 11 build, and there’s no public release date or channel announced. Discord hasn’t said when the general public will get the new client, so if you’re relying on the current app, keep using it as-is.
The good news is that the existing app isn’t going to vanish overnight. Until Discord rolls out the Phoenix client to a wider audience, the current Electron version — and its memory-restart test — will remain the app you actually run.
Source: Windows Latest
Over to you: Would you switch to the new native Discord client as soon as it’s available, or stick with the familiar app until it’s fully ready?
