I think that the problem with text is that the basic operation you want to do is inserts. The way memory works in computer makes that an inherently inefficient

I think that the problem with text is that the basic operation you want to do is inserts. The way memory works in computer makes that an inherently inefficient operation. I'm a bit fascinated by how bad computer are at text give that that is what we use so much of them for. As a C programmer I think that its not really possible to implement an efficient text processing library, because there is no good universal way to store text. So much depends on the pattern of the processing functions. If you want to avoid allocating new memory and moving a lot of text for each operation, the implementation needs to make speculative choices about how text can best be stored. How you store text depends so much on your access pattern. Do you need to be able to get to a line fast? or know how long the text is? Or insert something? and if so how much? A C style string would for instance be terrible for something like a text editor, because every key press would cause a complete copy of the document to have to be allocated, and then copied over. So maybe a linked list? But you dont want just one character in each link because that trashes the cache right? but then its still slow to just skip forward fast, so maybe an array of pointers to snipets? or maybe a linked list of pointers to snippets? So many possibilities that all impact performance differently depending on what you do with it. When I see higher languages with nice easy to use string functionality, I always consider, the impossible choices that had to be made under the hood.