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Comment by karmakaze | Hacker News Reader

Another useful datatype is a rope[0]. It is useful for using immutable/shared pieces that can build up to other longer compositions. In particular, an operation such as concatenation can be O(1) since that's matches the representation of a rope.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rope_(data_structure)

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Also worth noting that just about every javascript engine uses ropes internally to represent strings (most of the time).

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1o-MJPAddpfBfDZCkIHNKbMiM...

The Nim compiler used ropes internally for years, until recently[0] because removing them reduced memory consumption and decreased compile times, so ymmv

[0]https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/pull/20433

This is a big tell that maybe we don't want to know exactly the type, but to have way to let the compiler/benchmarks to pick the best performing data structure for the task at hand, but I think that on most programming languages neither the language nor the tooling help you too much here.*

*Saying this mostly with the intent of being proved wrong ;) kxcd://386

> most of the time

Looking at the reference[0] given at the very end of the document, wouldn't the word "sometimes" be more appropriate?

[0]: https://mrale.ph/blog/2016/11/23/making-less-dart-faster.htm...

Interesting, seems like things are more complicated than I thought.

A company had me implement that in Rust during an interview. It was pretty hard

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