On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 2:27 PM, Phil Endecott < spam_from_boost_dev@chezphil.org> wrote:
http://svn.chezphil.org/libpbe/trunk/include/string_qsort.hh
Of course the benefit depends on how many long common initial substrings there are. Testing with the output of "find / -print" (i.e. the pathnames of every file on my system, which will have lots of common initial substrings) it is a bit slower than std::sort. So the advantage of reducing the number of character comparisons [and that reduction is substantial] does not make up for the absence of whatever other cleverness std::sort does that I haven't replicated. But I thought I'd post it anyway, in case anyone is interested or can see how it could be improved. <http://lists.boost.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/boost>
Out of curiousity, did you test string_sort on the same example? string_sort guarantees a reduction of at least 1 character in length every iteration, which a comparison-based algorithm will not do. Also, you should try insertion sort on small data sets (size 16 or so); that should give your test algorithm a little speed boost.