Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord just showed why
windowslatest.com59 points by thunderbong 3 hours ago
59 points by thunderbong 3 hours ago
I'm 100% on this since Electron is probably the worst thing that happened to the desktop development.
Hiwever, I'd like to hijack this front page article to for a related concern/question I've got.
It seems that all (popular) opensource LLM harnesses are either in JS or python (pi, hermes, opencode, paseo). The same seems to be true for closed source harnesses that I have used (deepseek, chatgpt).
I'd really like to ask why? I mean why somebody would use technologies like JS or python to implement a harness application instead of golang or rust or even C? I understand that before 1 year JS or python would be tempting but right now? Especially the LLm related companies have unlimited tokens and re-writing the harness software to golang or rust should be trivial.
This would benefit so many people (especiall considering the prices and scarcity of RAM these days).
So, why nobody does it? This is an honest question, I don't want to offend interpreted languages but it should be a universal truth that a compiled language is faster and consumes less ram.
One good reason: extensibility. Pi is extremely malleable in ways that would probably be harder to achieve if it were in, say, Rust.
The resource usage of my harness is nothing compared to an electron app, and being able to easily customize it is more important to me than saving a few extra MB of ram.
Because it used to cost extraordinarily more money to build for a performance increases almost none cares about.
I'm pretty sure this was known since the early days of Electron. It was even one of the chief complaints about VS Code when it was first launched.
Electron's value prop has always been about having one team producing one app that is supported on multiple platforms with minimal additional effort.
This article does nothing to address that.
A huge pain of desktop development is managing dependencies particularly if you are coming from C++/Native code. Imagine you wanted to make a simple app in the 2010s that accesses the webcam for instance: If you use chrome you got the full html5 runtime, whereas with other tools you'd need bespoke libraries which your end user may not have.
The only way to ship the same code between linux, macOS, and Windows would have been to either use something like Qt or the JVM back in the 2010s. The JVM desktop stuff was super ugly and Java itself had become notorious (also if you wanted anything remotely interesting like webcam/microphone or multimedia access you'd still have to ship dynamic libraries). Qt required special packaging skills to ship to the end user especially if third party libraries were involved. Electron killed that by bundling chrome (and chrome has a huge api surface).
Today, I would argue the package management situation for a language like rust is a lot different. You dont have to cobble different DLLs together, you can just statically compile dependencies and cargo/rust do a pretty good job of making sure it's bundled with your app. Other languages also now have similarly useful tools.
The article at least indirectly addresses that.
At the time Electron came out, there weren’t as many cross-platform UI frameworks available that they could have gone with.
You can see this with the comparison chart. GPUI effectively replaced Electron so the desktop app UI works across platforms. React Native is replaced with WebAssembly so that Rust can be the primary language across all platforms including mobile.
It seems like the new situation for Discord is rather elegant, and that none of this would have been available when it first came out.
The problem is that it made everyone's life worse.
The electron hate train needs to pull in to the station and be retired. We can just admit that it was a good solution for the problems of its time just like JQuery. Electron was conceived over a decade ago and it was an imperfect solution, but there’s no denying that it was a solution.
Election predates WebAssembly by 5 years and hit the scene only one year after Rust was first created.
And just like JQuery, its time is coming to a close as better frameworks are available now that weren’t available back then.
I never thought election was a good solution for the problems of its time. Just call it a web app and don't lie to people releasing something "native" for them to download.
Not mine. I loathe Electron like many people. But, as someone who is legally blind and has very limited vision, being able to have custom UI zoom levels, per application, has made my life much easier.
For a long time, and mostly out of frustration, I wanted to build my own stack of software around my vision. But the mammoth amount of effort it would require meant I never went through with it.
nice point, people like to shit on the web but it has one of the biggest accessibility features that most of the gui frameworks would just leave them as feature suggestions for years
I'd note that as stuff like A11y gets added into something like Discord, we'll see the app slowly bloat up to compensate.
Google Chrome generally used around 25mb per tab in 2010. Today, that number is often 500mb or even 1gb.
> Electron's value prop
"Now you can have the cross-platform compatibility of a single-page application just by bundling Chrome."
It's worth remembering that electron was first released back in 2016 (formerly atom shell fro 2013) so Internet Explorer was still very much a thing.
Not a great justification, but it made a bit more sense then.
> The article does nothing to address that.
I dunno if you've been living under an enormous rock, but they used AI to make this.
Discord isn't really the model to follow here, IMO. They killed their native Android app and moved to React Native, and now they're dropping React Native (while mobile somehow keeps "native UI", according to their CTO's tweet). If they wanted to maximize code reuse and accelerate feature development, they should have instead considered Kotlin Multiplatform, then they could've skipped the React Native detour while actually building apps that are native to the platform. (Rust and its cacophony of UI frameworks are not really platform-native anywhere, as far as I'm aware. Maybe Pop OS, but I don't know anyone targeting that specifically.)
This bit is obviously subjective, but Rust as a language is simply not ergonomic enough for a lot of the use cases people are trying to apply it to, especially UI development. Most of the Rust UI libraries I've seen to date either use a more imperative style, or attempt to replicate more declarative approaches like Compose UI or SwiftUI, but without the nice language aesthetics that make it simple to read and write. And if the counter-argument there is for LLMs to be reading and writing this stuff, that's a whole other can of worms: (1) The subsidized inference era is quickly coming to an end and (2) if you're using LLMs anyway, why not maintain apps that are as native to each platform as possible?
I don’t doubt that this will be faster and smaller than the current app, but it’s slightly annoying to me that the new app is getting so much coverage with specific claims about speed and memory usage when it’s not actually feature-complete or released yet.
Electron is pretty awesome in that it allows a small team to build a decent GUI app using their existing web skillset but it also feels like it's time for something better at this point.
With the ram prices as crazy as they are. It's pretty frustrating to have to run multiple GB eating applications just to do some basic tasks (90% is read and write messages, in the case of Discord). I understand that other people might use the more advanced features (voice chat, etc) but these could be loaded on-demand.
It's a bit crazy to me that I can comfortable run an entire Linux stack (+ Podman, monitoring, alerting and multiple services) in 512 MB ram (with 40% free, just checked!). However my Windows PC needs 5.5GB just to show the desktop! Realistically it needs somewhere between 8GB and 16GB for some basic web browsing and even then it can feel slow if you have a few apps like Discord running in the background.
Sorry can you show a decent GUI app in Electron compared with a native one.
You show this by all your other comments on memory. The reason apps take memory is Electron.
Plus I prefer apps that behave like OS native apps not the reduced GUI of web apps.
Electron has always been about shipping cross-platform apps quickly, at the cost of higher memory usage and potentially worse performance. With or without LLMs, its core value proposition remains the same. LLMs simply amplify the framework’s existing strengths.
Raycast, originally a native macOS launcher, recently released v2 using a hybrid architecture. It’s not Electron, but it follows a similar approach to Spotify’s desktop app, using web technologies inside a native shell.
The memory usage is still pretty significant. It’s using around 350–450 MB at idle and can sometimes reach 1–2 GB depending on the workload. The upside is that they can now share most of their code across macOS and Windows and evolve beyond being just an app launcher.
It’s always been about trade-offs, and LLMs don’t fundamentally change that.
LLMs do change the tradeoff if you can now ship cross platform apps quickly, without electron.
GPUI is one example: some of the downsides of electron (UI is not native), but it solves memory and performance side, and shared codebase.
Just writing native apps because LLMs makes it cheaper is the other option. Shopify did this after years of react native.
We have gotten so used to slow app startup these days I believe. I have recently started using Task Slinger [1] and every single time I boot it, I get a feeling that it was already running and it's window just showed up. I wish all modern software were like this.
One nice thing about Électron is that it supports accessbility and non-english IMEs correctly, and thus all Electron apps have decent accessibility out of the box, comparable to web apps.
Most Rust GUI toolkits, at least in 2025, did not have that good accessibility or IME: https://www.boringcactus.com/2025/04/13/2025-survey-of-rust-...
Hopefully this has gotten better and the new discord client isn't worse in that regard.
GPUI has a single-paragraph accessibility section in their guide that defers to AccessKit[1] for everything, and points to a raw RS file for more info.[2]
I haven’t tested it or written anything using GPUI, but I’d expect it to be considerably harder work, based on the maturity of the web stack in this area. My assumptions have definitely been proven wrong before though… Anyone from Discord working on accessibility want to chime in?
[2] https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/blob/main/crates/gpui/...
I've rarely liked any Electron apps, both for the performance and because it seems to encourage a feeling of bloatedness, for want of a better word. Tried VS Code, but dropped it when they started putting too much AI in it and too much complexity. Sublime is so much better.
I don't know...there seems to be something unpleasant about all Electron apps.
They keep talking about 2 accounts logged in so that's why it's still high. But they've done nothing to defend that claim.
Also, pro tip, you can still just use it in browser. I hope that doesn't go away.
The barrier to entry for GPUI might be a bit high for some, but is there really any argument to be made against migrating to Tauri?
was wondering the same thing; my hunch-memory is that Tauri is not as performant on Windows. but that has not been my experience, Tauri seems great
Tauri's value prop over EGUI and GPUI is that its syntax is familiar to web devs.
On my mac I’ve banned Electron apps, only native ones - Slack on Safari.
It's hard to say "Discord just showed why" before the product is in production and sees actual use. Promising initial statistics, but the transition is based on a lot of assumptions that won't really be proven until mass adoption and the software has seen long-term maintenance.
...exactly, and at some point you want to show inline animations or videos and all sorts of other media, show webpage previews, play audio snippets and all the other things things a webpage can do, and then you're back to either integrating a browser engine or attempt to write one from scratch (the browser engine can of course be provided by the system webview, e.g. what Tauri does).
I’ve programmed inline video players for 25 years. Same with audio and everything else. We had “accelerated” graphics back with winxp and gdi+ and of course OpenGL over ssh with x11. Browser preview pages in most apps are usually snippets of text and maybe an icon or pic. Not rendering a full page.
In a way, applications regressed a lot with react native and electron. I get it’s easier to develop but the apps are very bloated and underperforming even on computers with 10-100x more power.
Rust to death i told them
Signal is still dragging Electron, can't have a working FreeBSD port due to dependency hell. Also VSCode.
Meanwhile Zed isn't really usable on machines without a GPU e.g. VDIs
https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/17212
I don't know if we have a winner here.
Let’s hope we see a new wave of desktop apps rewritten natively, thanks to LLMs. Whether they use Rust with GPUI, C++ with Dear ImGui, or something else entirely, that would be great. Personally, I’m so fed up with bloated UIs. Windows is full of them, and it’s a pity considering how powerful our CPUs are.
> C++ with Dear ImGui
it would be absolutely awful
compared to chromium, it's really limited, like it's just always a compromise with these
we should instead figure out a way to do electron but better and make it easier to do the things you can do with e.g. React with native languages and frameworks
The limitations are a large reason for why they're so resource efficient in the first place.
If you just reimplement Electron in a native language then you get... Chrome, which is already written in C++. The majority of RAM usage in Electron applications is from the native parts of Chrome itself and a decent ~40 MiB chunk for the Node.js runtime.
Are you a web dev?
I use ImGui regularly, if you believe that it is on the same level as what you can do with React/HTML/CSS/etc. then I don't know what to tell you
I have seen this assumption in recent GUI threads here (More so your upper post): Building a PC application is not equivalent to building a web browser. A web browser is a type of PC application built for a specific (But very broad!) use. I didn't think I would need to write this statement/distinction, but I have here. Web languages, culture, and syntax have not been a value add to PC application development. Electron is the clearest example why. My model is that is the value add of Electron: Appealing to web devs through language and culture.
I have had excellent results running a back-end Rust process that communicates with a C# Avalonia front-end via protobufs over named pipes on Windows and Domain Sockets on Linux and MacOS. With C# AOT I’ve been able to create self-contained apps that run incredibly fast despite the ipc between the front end and the rust core. I’m getting full 6 platform coverage too (Win/Linux/macOS on both x64 and arm64).
edit: Avalonia is quite mature, with accessibility to boot.
Crux, lets you use native UI but Rust for business layer: https://github.com/redbadger/crux
Could they of used servo?
I hope they can do some work on a11y because it's bed. Not as bad as it was but still slow and clunky to use with a screen reader.
On another note, Microsoft Teams and new Outlook use very little amount of memory on paper, because their main windows show up under the Edge name. It’s a Microsoft way of solving the high ram usage problem.
WebView2. Other applications can also use it but it seems like there's less out-of-the-box functionality than Electron
By being dishonest and misleading?
By reusing the system webview? It's what web frameworks should've done.
When has Microsoft not been dishonest and misleading? Being dishonest and misleading has been Microsoft's entire game plan since all the way back into the Bill Gates era.
I would not add alternative accounts to the account switcher, they've used these to coordinate bans ever since the account switcher's inception.
Great option for this that lets you use Rust along with real native UI for cross platform: https://github.com/redbadger/crux
"cross platform" I just spent 10 minutes trying to figure out what it uses for native on Linux, and whether it supports both Qt and GTK. Turns out the docs don't even mention Windows? "Cross platform" is now just MacOS + iOS + Android + Web? I guess the thought is supposed to be that crux helps you port your app to Windows if you want to... but even the example applications only run on those four platforms.
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