Pascal and I discussed this and we think it's generally better to take a 'RopeSlice' rather than a '&Rope'. The code block rendering function in the markdown component module is a good example for how this can be useful: we can remove an allocation of a rope and instead directly turn a '&str' into a 'RopeSlice' which is very cheap. A change to prefer 'RopeSlice' to '&Rope' whenever the rope isn't modified would be nice, but it would be a very large diff (around 500+ 500-). Starting off with just the syntax functions seems like a nice middle-ground, and we can remove a Rope allocation because of it. Co-authored-by: Pascal Kuthe <pascal.kuthe@semimod.de>