[nsajko]

This seems revisionist/ignorant. The article attributes a "piece tree" data structure to VS Code developers, however the must-read 1998 paper by Charles Crowley, Data Structures for Text Sequences, already mentions search trees as being used to enhance the naive piece table in some text editors.

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.48...

[starfreakclone]

Thank you for the pointer! I was actually not aware of this paper at all, which is why it was not included here (not sure how I missed it). I'll be sure to push a revision to the blog which mentions this paper.

[thaliaarchi]

You may also want to take a look at “Deletion: The curse of the red-black tree” (Germane and Might 2014), which presents functional deletion for red-black trees.

https://matt.might.net/papers/germane2014deletion.pdf

[zogrodea]

I might have a useful suggestion. I've implemented a Piece Tree (VS Code style) and a Rope in a functional language (found the Rope much faster at everything but I made a few adjustments to the structure so it's not a straightforward Rope).

The major failing point of the Piece Tree from my benchmarks is the substring/querying time. An idea I want to try out to speed up my Piece Tree implementation is to distinguish between Concat (metadata) and Leaf (string) nodes, just as a Rope does, storing metadata in the internal nodes and Pieces at the leaves.

The reason (I hope) that will improve substring times is because, in a Piece Tree, the original string can be reconstructed through an in-order traversal of the tree's internal nodes.

So, if you specify a substring range that starts from one character before the root node and ends one character after the root node, you end up traversing to the rightmost node in the left subtree and the leftmost node in the right subtree (two O(log n) operations).

I'm hopeful the tree depth that would need to be traversed if the nodes were at the Leaves (like in a Rope) would be shorter (especially since adjacent pieces won't be O(log n) distance away) and want to try it out myself, but my intuition might be wrong. You can have a go trying that out yourself if the idea interests you.

[keithnz]

I think you could probably get rid of the first sentence.

[nsajko]

Yeah, I regret writing it, but it's too late to edit the comment now.