Discord is ditching Electron and its new app uses less RAM

Re:Discord is ditching Electron and its new app uses less RAM by PreciousH on Thursday November 05, 2026 @09:15AM (#50379325)

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.

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Re:Discord is ditching Electron and its new app uses less RAM by pjmlp on Thursday November 05, 2026 @09:23AM (#50379421)

It is a full browser, not surprising at all, only for those that never coded native applications.

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Re:Discord is ditching Electron and its new app uses less RAM by asdff on Thursday November 05, 2026 @03:20PM (#50383955)

I mean so is lynx

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Re:Discord is ditching Electron and its new app uses less RAM by atomic_cattlepr on Thursday November 05, 2026 @03:57PM (#50384377)

Lynx is a "full browser" in the same way that Emacs is a "full word processor."

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Re:Discord is ditching Electron and its new app uses less RAM by fao_ on Thursday November 05, 2026 @04:49PM (#50384944)

... EMACS is a full word processor? It's a bit spartan in terms of how the interface feels, but functionally it's a lot better than what modern writers get given in vibecoded packages

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Re:Discord is ditching Electron and its new app uses less RAM by pjmlp on Thursday November 05, 2026 @04:11PM (#50384505)

Lynx was created for UNIX systems that used around 8 MB, and was text only, JavaScript was yet to be invented.

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Re:Discord is ditching Electron and its new app uses less RAM by odo1242 on Friday November 06, 2026 @01:22AM (#50388853)

More than that: it's a full browser that doesn't share any of the system browser libraries (using it's own browser engine) and also NodeJS. You can often save almost ~300-500 megabytes by switching to something like Tauri (even Tauri+NodeJS) that uses the system's own browser framework.

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Re:Discord is ditching Electron and its new app uses less RAM by c-hendricks on Thursday November 05, 2026 @09:43AM (#50379690)

Oh if you don't like large build artifacts Tauri might not be something to get excited about.

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Re:Discord is ditching Electron and its new app uses less RAM by deaton on Thursday November 05, 2026 @03:11PM (#50383847)

Its not Tauri, they're using GPUI

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Re:Discord is ditching Electron and its new app uses less RAM by c-hendricks on Thursday November 05, 2026 @04:00PM (#50384406)

You're right! Apologies. My brain saw Rust and Electron and went right to Tauri.

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