I've added fasterbzip2-1.0.5.zip to the Boost Vault as an example application of the Spreadsort hybrid radix sorting algorithm. As bzip is written in C, I couldn't use the template library directly and had to modify the source. Using the Spreadsort algorithm causes a measurable speed improvement on Windows for the first 100MB of wikipedia from: http://cs.fit.edu/~mmahoney/compression/textdata.html<http://cs.fit.edu/%7Emmahoney/compression/textdata.html> along with other data I tested. Please note that bzip doesn't spend all its time compressing, already has two stages of radix sort, and has specialized and manually inlined comparison functions, so it's heavily optimized to begin with and improvements are minor.