Module Core_kernel.Rope

A rope is a standard data structure that represents a single string as a tree of strings, allowing concatenation to do no work up front.

That is, a string formed by many Rope concatenations followed by a to_string needs only copy each input to the output once, whereas a string expression looking like a ^ b ^ c ^ ... ^ z must create an intermediate string for every concatenation, and will copy the original data into and out of short-lived temporary strings many times.

On the other hand, because String.concat [ s1; s2; s3; ... ] allocates a single string and copies the inputs into it, Rope is no improvement over that usage. Rope becomes useful when the construction of the sequence of strings is more complex -- a good example is prettyprinting an expression language, where you need to parenthesize subexpressions (appending a short string at both ends) and handle infix binary operators (appending two long strings both made up of many parts, with a short string in between).

Any operations that would produce a Rope longer than String.max_length raise instead. They are not marked with _exn on their names since (at least on 64-bit) this number is far in excess of the size of your memory, so isn't likely to come up in practice.

A more fully-featured Rope implementation is available in the zed library.