This was talk very interesting and dug into the Ropes data structure. Ropes are basically another way to deal with strings, but instead of being a single block of memory they are organized into blocks and a binary tree. Ropes are interesting because since they are broken up into blocks it makes splitting and appending much more optimized than normal strings. You can even split a string and use some of the same blocks, which is good for speed and memory. The speaker stumbled upon Ropes through Ruby Quiz and the ICFP which was an interesting story. The speaker wrote a new ruby library for Ropes that is hosted on RubyForge.
Ropes are pretty interesting and I had to look around for a similiar framework in .NET but I couldn’t find anything.
-James
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