There are so many high performance editors that are just lists of strings. It's evidently false they are not high performance.
If you really love strings, you might now
be thinking "better than a string? easy:
multiple strings." And you wouldn't be
that far off! Some editors do represent
text as an array-of-lines with each line
being a string. VS Code's Monaco editor
worked that way for quite a while, but an
array of strings can still be plagued by
the same problems as a single string.
Excessive memory consumption and
performance issues made the VS Code team
look for something better.Not saying that array of lines is more performant than ropes, but just adding a datapoint here.