Discord is ditching Electron and its new app uses less RAM

Re:Discord is ditching Electron and its new app uses less RAM by pornel on Thursday November 05, 2026 @10:07PM (#50387674)

If you're using an OS newer than Windows XP, then the app window is going to be rendered by a GPU-based compositor anyway.

I don't know about GPUI in particular, but it's possible to make GPU-accelerated rendering use less VRAM by generating graphics with shaders on the fly instead of uploading sprites/bitmaps drawn by the CPU.

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Re:Discord is ditching Electron and its new app uses less RAM by 7bit on Friday November 06, 2026 @10:55AM (#50393946)

Yeah, so why not use OS then for rendering and roll your own rendering pipeline?

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Re:Discord is ditching Electron and its new app uses less RAM by pornel on Friday November 06, 2026 @11:43AM (#50394747)

because OSes have different UI toolkits with their own vendor lock-in, quirks, limitations, preferred languages, legacy baggage, and random bursts of "everything is now deprecated except the newest fad which will be deprecated next year" and "we're making everything flat and/or semitransparent!". Then most of the time the stock widgets are too basic to even support what Discord wants. This is an expensive PITA to develop and test for, and it's what lead app developers to run away to Electron.

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