Engineering a sort function
@article{Bentley1993EngineeringAS, title={Engineering a sort function}, author={Jon Louis Bentley and M. Douglas McIlroy}, journal={Software: Practice and Experience}, year={1993}, volume={23} }
We recount the history of a new qsortfunction for a C library. Our function is clearer, faster and more robust than existing sorts. It chooses partitioning elements by a new sampling scheme; it partitions by a novel solution to Dijkstra's Dutch National Flag problem; and it swaps efficiently. Its behavior was assessed with timing and debugging testbeds, and with a program to certify performance. The design techniques apply in domains beyond sorting.
208 Citations
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- Computer ScienceArXiv
- 2021
A new solution for the Dutch national flag problem is proposed, requiring no three-way comparisons, which gives quicksort a proper worst-case runtime of O(nk) for inputs with k distinct elements.…
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A highly tuned version of the Quicksort algorithm was implemented in the Unix system’s main memory sort function, qsort, for two decades, and performed admirably.
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This paper uses the new tool MaLiJAn to confirm that asymmetric pivot choices are preferable to symmetric ones for this Quicksort variant asymptotically for combinatorial cost measures such as the total number of executed instructions.
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- Computer ScienceSoftw. Pract. Exp.
- 2004
A library function based on Chen's Proportion Extend Sort (psort) which is robust and faster than BM qsort is introduced, inspired by the fact that psort is generally faster than qsort, and in the worst case, qsort requires O(n2) comparisons, while psort requiresO(n log n).
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- 2003
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