Ever since my very first programming class in high school, I've been hearing that string operations are slower — i.e. more costly — than the mythical "average operation." Why makes them so slow? (This question left intentionally broad.)
Computer Science – Why Are Strings So Slow?
computer sciencestrings
Best Answer
"The average operation" takes place on primitives. But even in languages where strings are treated as primitives, they're still arrays under the hood, and doing anything involving the whole string takes O(N) time, where N is the length of the string.
For example, adding two numbers generally takes 2-4 ASM instructions. Concatenating ("adding") two strings requires a new memory allocation and either one or two string copies, involving the entire string.
Certain language factors can make it worse. In C, for example, a string is simply a pointer to a null-terminated array of characters. This means that you don't know how long it is, so there's no way to optimize a string-copying loop with fast move operations; you need to copy one character at a time so you can test each byte for the null terminator.