3 ms·

If you prefer the video format, I also gave a talk based on this content at RubyKaigi 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQnxukip368 https://www.youtube.com

• swingline-747 8y ago
  To give some context, rstring rep is like an expanded Pascal rep with more metadata. rstrings allow nearly free substrings if string data is immutable. IIRC this is similar to what Java uses for string-table constants (CONSTANT_Utf8_info). For historical context, a string rep besides ASCIIZ / charZ (NUL-terminated) was dollar-terminated used by DOS. Pascal would store a byte length at the head of a string to indicate it's length.