Making Tech Headlines · Page 6
Discord Rebuilds Its Desktop App So Chat Can Leave Some Memory for Everything Else
· New York time
Discord is replacing Electron with a desktop client built fully in Rust, a change the company says should reduce resource use and improve performance and memory safety. Chief technology officer Stanislav Vishnevskiy said Discord has used Rust since 2018 in infrastructure, voice technology and parts of its current client. The company also says mobile will keep native interfaces while sharing application code with desktop through Rust. The rewrite addresses a familiar complaint about chat software: a program used to exchange messages can consume a surprisingly large share of a computer's attention. Electron helped teams build desktop applications using web technologies, but Discord is now betting that a different approach can make its client leaner. Those gains remain a company expectation, and users will be able to assess the result when they have the new client in hand. A programming language does not automatically make every application efficient, even if it gives developers different tools for managing memory. Still, the goal is easy to understand. People open a chat window to talk to friends, not to watch a laptop perform an elaborate cooling demonstration. Discord's engineering project promises to make the conversation less demanding on the machine. The computer may finally have enough room to run the game everyone opened the chat to discuss.
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