One of the great things about high-level languages is that you can depend on the existence of strings to work with text. Ruby is no exception; its String class is as flexible as it is useful. It’s hard to imagine a program that doesn’t use String somewhere. But how is Ruby’s String class implemented? And how can knowing this help us to write more efficient programs? In this talk, Chris Kelly (re)-introduces us to the innards of Ruby’s String class, and shows us how many parts of Ruby’s memory system interact when working with strings. If you’re a Ruby developer, you’re no longer to take string allocation for granted after watching this talk.