In the second post of the Zed Decoded series, the co-founders discuss the data structure at the core of Zed: the rope. They explain how ropes differ from strings in memory representation, highlighting the efficiency and performance improvements ropes offer over strings when dealing with large texts and edits. Zed’s rope implementation, known as SumTree, is revealed to be a unique twist on the classic rope concept, utilizing Arc for thread-safe reference-counting. The discussion delves into the technical details of SumTree and emphasizes how Zed’s rope enables concurrent access and efficient text parsing, making it the ideal choice for a high-performance code editor like Zed.
https://zed.dev/blog/zed-decoded-rope-sumtree