Compare Strings vs Ropes from the Performance Analysis

Array-based strings have smaller overhead, so (for example) concatenation and split operations are faster on small datasets. However, when array-based strings are used for longer strings, time complexity and memory use for inserting and deleting characters becomes unacceptably large.

In contrast, a rope data structure has stable performance regardless of data size. Further, the space complexity for ropes and arrays are both O(n). From this, we can derive that ropes are more preferable when the size of our data is large and it is to be modified on a regular basis. String arrays perform better on smaller data & are better when there are less operations.