Ropes, an Alternative to Strings [pdf] (1995)
I think the ropes are less useful now than they were in 1995 because of the evolution of CPU and memory systems. In 1995 100 Mhz was considered a fast speed, and memory access was not that much slower than the CPU.<p>Now CPU&#x27;s are in the GHZ ranges, and memory is a huge bottleneck. This is why a significant portion of the CPU is the integrated memory controller and various levels of cache.<p>With the current paradigm, cache friendliness will often trump something that has fewer instructions. With regular strings, scanning or copying a string is in order memory access which will take advantage of pre-fetching of the cache. With ropes, there will be pointer chasing which will cause all sorts of cache misses.<p>So, I think ropes are likely an even more niche use case than they were in 1995.