[boost] bzip with spreadsort

Subject: [boost] bzip with spreadsort
From: Steven Ross (spreadsort_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-10-20 10:39:33

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
>
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.