Schedule

Kevin Menard
Kevin Menard
@nirvdrum
Kevin is a researcher at Oracle Labs where he works as part of a team developing a high performance Ruby implementation in conjunction with the JRuby team. He’s been involved with the Ruby community since 2008 and has been doing open source in some capacity since 1999. In his spare time he’s a father of two and enjoys playing drums.
EN

A Tale of Two String Representations

Strings are used pervasively in Ruby. If we can make them faster, we can make many apps faster.

In this talk, I will be introducing ropes: an immutable tree-based data structure for implementing strings. While an old idea, ropes provide a new way of looking at string performance and mutability in Ruby. I will describe how we replaced a byte array-oriented string representation with a rope-based one in JRuby+Truffle. Then we’ll look at how moving to ropes affects common string operations, its immediate performance impact, and how ropes can have cascading performance implications for apps.

Presentation Material

Recorded video