Why are Lists faster than character arrays for string concatenation

Question

Why does method 3 (Mutable Character Arrays) result in a significantly slower performance than method 4 (joining a list of strings)?

As far as I know, both of them are mutable and I would think that they should have comparable performance.

Answer 1

It's true that in the list-append method, the list is mutable. But building up the list isn't the slow part. If you have 1000 strings of average length 1000, you're doing 1000000 mutations to the array, but only 1000 mutations to the list (plus 1000 increfs to string objects).

In particular, that means the array will have to spend 1000x as much time expanding (allocating new storage and copying the whole thing so far).

The slow part for the list method is the str.join call at the end. But that isn't mutable, and doesn't require any expanding. It uses two passes, to first calculate the size needed, then copy everything into it.