Comments on: Quicksort killer

By: How to write a self-printing program | Igor Ostrovsky Blogging

How to write a self-printing program | Igor Ostrovsky Blogging — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 07:29:27 +0000

[...] Quicksort killer [...]

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Skip lists are fascinating! | Igor Ostrovsky Blogging — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 07:09:57 +0000

[...] Quicksort killer [igoro.com] [...]

By: Efficient auto-complete with a ternary search tree | Igor Ostrovsky Blogging

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 09:25:57 +0000

[...] Quicksort killer [...]

By: flux

flux — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 21:24:17 +0000

Introsort?

http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introsort

By: Alex Greneir

Alex Greneir — Mon, 12 May 2008 14:39:34 +0000

Radix sort for the win!

By: igoro

igoro — Sat, 10 May 2008 16:47:33 +0000

Paco: of course I’ve heard of merge sort. Merge sort guarantees O(N log N) running time, but a typical implementation also requires O(N) additional memory. There are some implementations that do in-place merging and thus only require O(1) extra memory, while still guaranteeing O(N log N) running time. Unfortunately, the constant-memory implementations have a large constant, and also are rather complicated.

By: David

David — Sat, 10 May 2008 14:24:23 +0000

If you require GUARANTEED performance, i.e. that performance will not exceed an upper bound, heapsort is what you want.

Quicksort is great and all, but its inconsistency can be a killer where good performance is required, but bad performance is unacceptable.

And, on the upside, since heapsort requires no non-deterministic internal branching, in machine code compiled applications with a good optimising compiler you can be guaranteed that your pipelines stay saturated and that you get on average better performance than quicksort. The only real downside is that it has very bad cache locality.

The last few points aren’t really applicable to C#, but interesting to note, nonetheless.

By: Paco

Paco — Sat, 10 May 2008 10:23:37 +0000

Ever heard of merge sort?

By: kutay

kutay — Sat, 10 May 2008 09:59:32 +0000

cool

By: DotNetKicks.com

DotNetKicks.com — Fri, 09 May 2008 08:04:16 +0000

How to break quicksort…

You’ve been kicked (a good thing) – Trackback from DotNetKicks.com…