I first discovered ropes - aka cords - from Boehm's library, alongside the conservative collector.
IIRC, Internet Explorer used a binary tree to represent its strings, at least at version 5 in the early 2000s, because of the inefficiency of doing lots of copying for string operations - looped concatenation was one of the primary drivers. That doesn't mean it went all the way to ropes, of course.
IIRC, Internet Explorer used a binary tree to represent its strings, at least at version 5 in the early 2000s, because of the inefficiency of doing lots of copying for string operations - looped concatenation was one of the primary drivers. That doesn't mean it went all the way to ropes, of course.