I had trouble reading more than the opening volley of the article due to popups. Am a Discord user, and rust application programmer: What GUI framework are they using? EGUI? GPUI? Something custom?
GPUI from comments? I meant to try GPUI, but backed off after an announcement pending its maintenance would be in question (?) a few months ago, and Zed broadly ending up being a false messiah, for my uses. (Not on the tier of JetBrains IDEs, a bug with a long thread they closed which (still I believe?) causes it to open cached versions of files, then clobber edits made since the cache, e.g. by other programs. I.e. the sort of bug which renders software too dangerous to use. I will not switch to a GUI framework from a group that ignores bugs of that severity reported by many people)
I'm very interested in (and a total novice in) cross platform GUI application development. Hadn't heard of GPUI, though I had heard of Tauri. I looked at the GPUI front page and saw this mess of almost-CSS method chaining... Surely there's a better way? This seems horrible to me.
Sure, a Rust implementation will perform better and use less RAM, but it's quite obvious that the transition to Rust will be done almost entirely by AI.
Don't get me wrong, the AI coded Rust version of Discord will most likely work just fine. The thing I'm wondering about is if it's a good idea to rewrite your whole codebase (which I assume is handwritten since Discord predates AI coding) with AI because now there is nobody that knows how it really works - I'm wondering what's the value of having a human-written codebase + the people who wrote it. Just feels like one shouldn't throw that into the trash like it's nothing?
It's crazy how much RAM electron needs, at my old startup the main product was an electron app, i initially used to run into this issue where AI wouldn't clean up the dev builds it spunned up for e2e testing and each could be over 500MB, it just get's to a point that the cross platform advantage is no longer worth it, i think it was one of the main reasons cursor had to move off electron to rust based builds.
Can someone explain to me why a text editor needs to be GPU-accelerated? Literally, you are only blitting a few icons and painting text. What am I missing? To be clear, I am not here to doubt that the toolkit is good. Rather, I am asking why is "GPU-accelerated" important? Most people in 2026 that use an IDE are also equipped with a multi-GHz CPU has has plenty of compute to paint whatever pixels necessary at more than 60Hz refresh rate.
I noticed this news and because one of my codex banked reset is expiring soon
I launch codex with astra+ultra on my tauri project because webview sometimes cause blank screen on user device to let it to rewrite the tauri projec to GPUI
It did those stuffs for me
- get rid of the CGO and MINGW toolchain for cross building windows on Linux
- wrote a compatbility layer to communicate the original app backend written using rust
- Achieve not ideal but acceptable UI/UX as the tauri project
- The new build using 24MB memory which is quite good and I do not even bother to check the tauri version
It amazing time to rewrite, though I still can't remember joy of old days that manual coding, but my lower back ask me to just embrace the Agentic coding...
Who cares? I've never had performance issues with Slack, Discord and the like. It runs fast enough on my MBP. They could make it faster by removing the casino lights and prompts and upsells, and research other ways to monetize. Electron is not the issue with Discord, it's their constant annoying nagging.
We need all the apps, websites etc services to take time to optimize their stuff for RAM, CPU use etc.. it's nuts we have these insanely powerful devices and crappy software and sites can bring them to their knees.
I just pray that Vencord will continue to work in some form, if only so I can use whatever font I want. I'm not a fan of many other changes they've made and I've thus had to reverse, but I'm willing to trade away the flexibility of CSS for an app that uses 5 times less RAM. Even better if it doesn't go away at all, but we'll see.
Notable on the mobile app side that react native is getting tossed out along with electron.
It makes sense and I think they are going to be more teams moving in this direction.
Now that agents are good enough to one shot native UI from a Figma spec, these extra layers will be seen more as adding unnecessary complexity and ram bloat.
Was no one else using Discord as a progressive web app, striking the best balance between resource footprint, no additional local apps on their device, still preserving their native UI, etc?
GPUI is quite a strange choice because there are so many forks of it, because Zed which made it is not interested in PRs that don't serve their use case of text editors, thus lots of common sense PRs for general desktop development were rejected.
I highly doubt they'd throw away decade of engineering of the JavaScript application, to rewrite it from scratch using native platform UIs. Probably would change desktop wrapper from Electron to Tauri or something else
There was already an electron-free native client for discord some years back, but they interfered with it. At this point, there's nothing at all impressive about this. It's not hard to ask AI to "RIIR" as has been shown many times. However, I am glad that building stuff on electron might finally be seen as lazy and wasteful.
I didn't see it mentioned in the article, but does this mean that you will no longer be able to use Discord exclusively via the browser, without installing a native app? Because that's my preferred way to use Discord, since the browser nicely sandboxes it, whereas a native application generally runs unrestricted.
Serein[0] recently got on my radar, being exactly that (A Rust Discord client). Been using it for the last few weeks, and boy is it snappy! I rather like this trend of stuff being rewritten in Rust (usually via LLMs). Spotifast[1] being another great example.
Perhaps Discord caught wind that this is now possible, and don’t want to be left behind?
99% of the important parts here are not Rust itself but whatever stack is drawing the UI. This whole article is based on a Twitter post, except it's longer yet still has info missing, so I just went to https://x.com/svishnevskiy/status/2118081920194203799 and the answer is GPUI.
Asking in good faith: In the agentic age why use abstractions like Electron at all? Shouldn't we write apps in lower-level system languages like Rust like Discord has done?
It's great to see so many big companies making the switch to Rust. It is an amazing language and by now it has proven to be a solid multi-purpose language.
Many engineer consider Rust a systems programming language (and it is!), but it also offers great abstractions to write on a higher level, building API's and Interfaces
SO annoying that pay only subscription only articles continue to rank in the top pages of this.. a paid only or subscription only article that is not accessible to everyone should automatically no be considered for 1st page ranking
What?? As much as I despise Discord this is a positive trend, hope other companies follow suit. Javascript on desktop is a plague on computing and the sooner it dies, the better.
We've barely begun seeing the impact of AI on software (IMHO). Things like vibecoding the Adobe suite are going to destroy Adobe. That's going to happen to other companies too. It'll take awhile but it will happen.
I've always disliked Electron apps in principle. The idea was you could write once, run anywhere, which is something we've heard before so many times but it never really works out that way. Back in the early days of Java we heard this mantra with applets and Java desktop apps and the reality was "write once, test everywhere".
The cost is simply too high. Nobody wants an entire browser engine packaged to run a desktop app. Security-wise, this is a nightmare. It's such a huge attack surface (eg [1]). And resource-wise it's also a nightmare. Honestly, Electron apps can't die fast enough for my liking.
What I think we'll see is a return to desktop apps because the cost of porting them to new platforms is dropping like a rock.
There are modding issues with Discord's migration but I believe modding itself is going to be an issue in a world where it's going to be increasingly easy to find and use exploits.
I also wonder if Discord is the best we can do here. I've always hated Discord from a UI/UX perspective. Nothing about it is intuitive (IMHO). There are like 3 different settings buttons. You join a Discord and you get yet another custom flow of having to go to this channel and select roles and do something before you can do something else blah blah blah. Everything feels shoe horned. And Discord channels are a worse repository for information than the old forums were.
Electron being bad is a bit of a junior- to mid-level engineer tell in my eyes, the sort of thing you'd say if you've just learned that some apps use more RAM than others, maybe built a small Rust TUI and are now wondering why not everything is using Rust. Something you'd believe just before you learn what engineering trade-offs are.
So, yeah, enjoy rebuilding complete browsers, I guess? I'm sure they'll run more efficiently than the rendering engines that have been refined and tweaked over the course of now multiple decades.
Well, unless you leave out the annoying stuff, like a11y, IME, RTL, but who needs those things anyway, am I right.
Then you find out that iterating on a fully Rust-based app is sloooow, so you add a scripting layer, maybe integrate a little Lua VM or something that lets you execute JavaScript?
Congratulations. You've built a browser, just with fewer features, more bugs, and probably higher RAM usage. Good job.
If all products ditch Electron, it satisfies the NSA requirements of having AI-generated backdoors on your computer, while allowing you to reduce your RAM consumption and letting this precious silicon for Sam Altman (He's quoted saying RAM is better spent in data centers than in personal computers - and in an era where everything is Cloud, one might wonder why the base Macbook Pro has 32GB).
Discord is ditching Electron and its new app uses less RAM
(theverge.com)475 points by archb 5 November 2026 | 413 comments
Comments
GPUI from comments? I meant to try GPUI, but backed off after an announcement pending its maintenance would be in question (?) a few months ago, and Zed broadly ending up being a false messiah, for my uses. (Not on the tier of JetBrains IDEs, a bug with a long thread they closed which (still I believe?) causes it to open cached versions of files, then clobber edits made since the cache, e.g. by other programs. I.e. the sort of bug which renders software too dangerous to use. I will not switch to a GUI framework from a group that ignores bugs of that severity reported by many people)
> div() .flex() .flex_col() .gap_3() .bg(rgb(0x505050)) .size(px(500.0)) .justify_center() .items_center() .shadow_lg() .border_1() .border_color(rgb(0x0000ff)) .text_xl() .text_color(rgb(0xffffff)) .child(format!("Hello, {}!", &self.text)) .child( div() .flex() .gap_2() .child(div().size_8().bg(gpui::red())) .child(div().size_8().bg(gpui::green())) .child(div().size_8().bg(gpui::blue())) .child(div().size_8().bg(gpui::yellow())) .child(div().size_8().bg(gpui::black())) .child(div().size_8().bg(gpui::white())), )
Sure, a Rust implementation will perform better and use less RAM, but it's quite obvious that the transition to Rust will be done almost entirely by AI.
Don't get me wrong, the AI coded Rust version of Discord will most likely work just fine. The thing I'm wondering about is if it's a good idea to rewrite your whole codebase (which I assume is handwritten since Discord predates AI coding) with AI because now there is nobody that knows how it really works - I'm wondering what's the value of having a human-written codebase + the people who wrote it. Just feels like one shouldn't throw that into the trash like it's nothing?
Goodbye Electron, we barely knew you
I launch codex with astra+ultra on my tauri project because webview sometimes cause blank screen on user device to let it to rewrite the tauri projec to GPUI
It did those stuffs for me
- get rid of the CGO and MINGW toolchain for cross building windows on Linux
- wrote a compatbility layer to communicate the original app backend written using rust
- Achieve not ideal but acceptable UI/UX as the tauri project
- The new build using 24MB memory which is quite good and I do not even bother to check the tauri version
It amazing time to rewrite, though I still can't remember joy of old days that manual coding, but my lower back ask me to just embrace the Agentic coding...
I just pray that Vencord will continue to work in some form, if only so I can use whatever font I want. I'm not a fan of many other changes they've made and I've thus had to reverse, but I'm willing to trade away the flexibility of CSS for an app that uses 5 times less RAM. Even better if it doesn't go away at all, but we'll see.
It makes sense and I think they are going to be more teams moving in this direction.
Now that agents are good enough to one shot native UI from a Figma spec, these extra layers will be seen more as adding unnecessary complexity and ram bloat.
Activities will apparently still use Tauri. Is that going to be a compatibility nightmare due to WebKit? (At least until CEF comes out)
Perhaps Discord caught wind that this is now possible, and don’t want to be left behind?
[0]: https://github.com/ViceVerse-cz/Serein
[1]: https://github.com/crmne/spotifast
https://nitter.click/svishnevskiy/status/2118081920194203799
electron is a blight on computing
Maybe we should collectively use more of our personal tokens to re/write, extend and mix up the common(s) stacks at this point?
Such a rewrite would have been unthinkable 2 years ago, but now it's table stakes.
I've always disliked Electron apps in principle. The idea was you could write once, run anywhere, which is something we've heard before so many times but it never really works out that way. Back in the early days of Java we heard this mantra with applets and Java desktop apps and the reality was "write once, test everywhere".
The cost is simply too high. Nobody wants an entire browser engine packaged to run a desktop app. Security-wise, this is a nightmare. It's such a huge attack surface (eg [1]). And resource-wise it's also a nightmare. Honestly, Electron apps can't die fast enough for my liking.
What I think we'll see is a return to desktop apps because the cost of porting them to new platforms is dropping like a rock.
There are modding issues with Discord's migration but I believe modding itself is going to be an issue in a world where it's going to be increasingly easy to find and use exploits.
I also wonder if Discord is the best we can do here. I've always hated Discord from a UI/UX perspective. Nothing about it is intuitive (IMHO). There are like 3 different settings buttons. You join a Discord and you get yet another custom flow of having to go to this channel and select roles and do something before you can do something else blah blah blah. Everything feels shoe horned. And Discord channels are a worse repository for information than the old forums were.
[1]: https://www.sentinelone.com/vulnerability-database/cve-2026-...
15 years reading the verge without subscription. What happened?
So, yeah, enjoy rebuilding complete browsers, I guess? I'm sure they'll run more efficiently than the rendering engines that have been refined and tweaked over the course of now multiple decades.
Well, unless you leave out the annoying stuff, like a11y, IME, RTL, but who needs those things anyway, am I right.
Then you find out that iterating on a fully Rust-based app is sloooow, so you add a scripting layer, maybe integrate a little Lua VM or something that lets you execute JavaScript?
Congratulations. You've built a browser, just with fewer features, more bugs, and probably higher RAM usage. Good job.
edit: there is one https://github.com/Sidenai/sidex haven't tried it yet
If all products ditch Electron, it satisfies the NSA requirements of having AI-generated backdoors on your computer, while allowing you to reduce your RAM consumption and letting this precious silicon for Sam Altman (He's quoted saying RAM is better spent in data centers than in personal computers - and in an era where everything is Cloud, one might wonder why the base Macbook Pro has 32GB).