In order to allow concatenation of strings to be efficient in both time and space, it must be possible for the result to share much of the data structure with its arguments. This implies that fully manual storage management (e.g. based on explicit malloc/free) is impractical. (It can be argued that this is true even with conventional string representations. Manual storage management typically results in much needless string copying.) Though an explicitly reference counted implementation can be built, we will assume automatic garbage collection.
https://www.cs.rit.edu/usr/local/pub/jeh/courses/QUARTERS/FP/Labs/CedarRope/rope-paper.pdf
#paper #string #strings #rope #gc #storage
