Re:Lampsort: Leslie Lamport's Non-recursive Quicksort
by TheLoneWolfling on Monday December 08, 2014 @06:58AM
(#8716010)
> I've never heard that the size of the stack is really a problem in quicksort
Naive quicksort tends to, in pathological cases, run out of stack space as opposed to having performance issues.
Smallest-interval ends up with a strict upper limit of O(log n) elements in the running set, as opposed to O(n) for naive quicksort. This can be useful.
Recursing on one of the two halves of the "current" partition is the cache friendliest option. Smallest interval will guarantee this by induction, I think, but I've never heard that the size of the stack is really a problem in quicksort. If you continuously partition out only a single element, your runtime is going to suck, even if you "sort" those elements first.