Re: [boost] Proposed templated integer_sort

From: Simonson, Lucanus J (lucanus.j.simonson_at_[hidden])
Date: 2008-07-07 16:10:48

Phil wrote:
>Having said all that, personally I have little interest in an algorithm
>that has no benefit for fewer than millions of items.  What do other 
>people think about that aspect?

I forgot to mention, anyone interested in runtime of an application that
spends a lot of time sorting large data volumes is going to do it on an
up-to-date machine, which means 4, 8, 16 or 32 cores today and many more
very soon.  There is more than one source for a parallel_sort that
should beat both std::sort and introsort by an order of magnitude on the
machines that I use for large data sets, and if I were really interested
in sorting faster I'd be using the threaded algorithms.

I think std::sort is a straw man to compare yourself to, not because it
isn't good at what it does, but because the target use case in question
of very large data volumes is better suited to a parallel algorithm.
Parallelize spreadsort, compare yourself to the good parallel sorting
algorithms and suddenly the whole issue will become a lot more relevant
and applicable to what is currently going on in the industry.  

Luke