Discord’s unreleased desktop app, rebuilt in Rust, started up and loaded a user’s friends list before the company’s current Electron-based client had finished its loading screen, according to a 15-second video posted by Discord co-founder and chief technology officer Stanislav Vishnevskiy on X. The clip, which Windows Latest reported on November 6, had 2.3 million views at the time of that report, and Discord employees confirmed that both apps in the comparison were launched from a cold start. The side-by-side also put a number on memory use for the new Discord Rust client: 290.2MB in Task Manager, with two accounts signed in simultaneously.
A 15-second side-by-side with 2.3 million views
Discord’s official account shared the same clip, with the current client on the left and the Rust rebuild on the right. Windows Latest went through the video frame by frame and described what happens: the current client opens first and shows a blank dark window for about three seconds, followed by a tip reading “In the ancient days, Discord started as a browser-only app.”
The new client is double-clicked roughly a second and a half later, yet its window fades in within a second, according to the outlet’s frame-by-frame review. By the time the old app reaches its interface, about five seconds after launch, the Rust version already has the friends list loaded, while the Electron client briefly displays “There are no friends online at this time.”
“The new Discord client using less RAM is just part of the story. Clicking around feels instant, I can’t go back. Check out the boot time,” Vishnevskiy wrote on X.
Replies on X questioned whether the new app had simply been restored from the system tray. “Both are cold starts, it’s really that fast. We’ve been using it internally now for a while and the first time I tried it I thought I’d forgot to close it when I opened it fresh,” replied Coral, who leads audio and video at Discord. Travis, who works on socials and community at Discord and filmed the clip, added that a tray launch would mean “the friends list would have already been loaded!” Vishnevskiy thanked him for “finding these janky old laptops,” which Windows Latest identified as ThinkPads with a Copilot key, placing them at 2024 or newer.
Why the Discord Rust client skips the Starting screen
The current app typically checks for updates and shows a “Starting” screen on launch, which one person on X said “takes like 5-10s every time.” Asked why the rebuilt app skips it, Coral said, “It bootstraps so fast + is a new architecture so we don’t need that modal at all. We auto-update in the background.”
Those background updates are not being routed through Microsoft’s distribution channels. Asked whether Discord was handing updates to the Microsoft Store or Windows’ Update Orchestration Platform, Coral said, “We do not at this moment.”
290.2MB with two accounts running at once
When one reply called 290MB “still vile” for a chat app, Vishnevskiy answered, “Those 4k avatar decorations gotta render somewhere 😉 but joking aside this client is actually running 2 accounts concurrently which is supported in new client.” Discord’s existing Account Switcher lets users add up to five accounts and swap between them; asked whether the new client could keep work and personal accounts running “without needing to tear down the client in between,” Vishnevskiy replied, “Yup.”
For context, Windows Latest noted that a Discord employee said in December 2025 that normal usage is under 1GB, while the company tested auto-restarting the app at 4GB. On that basis, the outlet calculated that 290.2MB is about 70% below the 1GB mark, and said the Electron app typically idles at 1-2GB on its own PCs. The outlet cautioned that the figure is a snapshot from an early build and that Discord has not published a like-for-like benchmark of both clients. More coverage of desktop software performance is collected in our technology news section.
Discord has also tried to trim the existing app from the inside. Its September patch notes say an upgrade to Electron 42 cut median CPU usage by about 17%, but “at the cost of a smaller regression to p50 memory usage (~4%).”
GPUI framework instead of Tauri or WinUI
Electron inherits its multi-process architecture from Chromium, so each Electron app ships its own browser engine with a main process and a renderer process for each window. Tauri, which many observers expected Discord to choose, uses Rust for app logic but renders the interface in HTML, CSS and JavaScript inside the system webview, which is WebView2 on Windows.
Instead, Discord built on GPUI, described as “A fast, hybrid immediate and retained mode, GPU-accelerated UI framework for Rust” from the makers of the Zed code editor. The GPUI framework draws the interface on the GPU without any HTML, and Rust, which Discord has used since 2018, manages memory without a garbage collector. Discord maintains its own patches on top of GPUI, and Vishnevskiy said “we will see what we can upstream if relevant to the community.” Windows Latest noted that GPUI already powers Zed on Windows, macOS and Linux, while Microsoft’s WinUI runs only on Windows, and that Discord has not mentioned WinUI.
Web technology remains in places. YouTube embeds and Activities will use the system webview: “We use the native webview similar to Tauri,” Vishnevskiy said of Activities. The browser version will keep rendering HTML, but “logic will be WASM instead of JS,” letting the web app share the Rust code. Mobile apps keep native interfaces while sharing app code with desktop through Rust. On React Native, Vishnevskiy said, “Since the beginning the iOS app started as React native, Android was ported to React Native couple years ago to achieve parity as it was always lagging in features.” As for the interface itself, he said, “The app looks and works identically to the current one.”
Private testing before any public release
In Task Manager the rebuild appears as Discord Phoenix. Discord marketing director Ryan K. Rigney said of availability, “Going into private testing soon. Gonna take our time to make sure it’s stable and secure first. Won’t be long, tho.” Mark Smith, Discord’s VP of Engineering, said that “accessibility and security are just as important to us as performance,” and Coral confirmed the new client keeps the login token in the system keyring, which is Credential Manager on Windows 10 and 11.
The work is not Windows-only. Asked whether the Discord Rust client works on Linux, Rigney replied, “Yes,” and Coral said, “a lot of people run Mac internally!” Discord has not announced a public release date. Follow NarwhalTV for updates as the private test opens.
