VS Code's New Text Buffer: A Piece Tree Triumph

VS Code 1.21 boasts a brand-new, significantly faster and more memory-efficient text buffer implementation. The previous line-array-based approach struggled with large files, leading to out-of-memory crashes. The new implementation uses a Piece Tree—a structure combining multiple buffers and a red-black tree—resulting in greatly reduced memory usage and improved file opening and editing speeds. While random line access is slightly slower, real-world impact is minimal. This rewrite also avoids performance pitfalls encountered with a native C++ approach, highlighting the power of clever data structures and algorithms.