Discord has shown an early internal build of its new Rust-based client, code-named Phoenix. The preview came from CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy, and the pitch is pretty straightforward: cut RAM use hard and get desktop and mobile startup times way down.
Vishnevskiy says the desktop build sits at about 290MB of RAM, compared with the current Electron app, which usually lands somewhere around 500MB to 600MB. Some installs climb to 785MB, and some go past 1GB. He also says Phoenix starts in about 1 second instead of 6, and feels quicker when you’re switching servers, opening chats, or joining calls.
On the desktop side, Discord is moving away from Electron, and on mobile it’s moving away from React Native. Chromium‘s overhead inside Electron is the main thing Discord wants to shed. Mobile, though, is still expected to keep native iOS and Android interfaces while sharing more Rust code with the desktop client, which should make the cross-platform codebase cleaner.
Vishnevskiy says the client is being built on the Rust-based GPUI framework, with Discord patching it rather than going with Tauri. That lines up with the company’s broader push into Rust, which goes back to 2018. In 2020, Discord said a Go-to-Rust rewrite of Read States increased capacity by 10x, cut memory use by 30%, and lowered latency by 50%.
If you use Discord a lot for gaming, streaming, or community servers, this is worth keeping an eye on. There isn’t anything to download yet. Phoenix is still an internal build, and Vishnevskiy says it’s heading into testing soon. There’s still no release date, and there aren’t any independent benchmarks yet. Even so, Discord is clearly joining Steam and Epic in the push for faster, lighter launchers.
Author: Emmanuel Bosque
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