An ugly but non-intrusive workaround, that would not add much overhead for usual cases,taking advantage of quadraticness blowing up in stack overflow before long:
public class ParanoidSort { public static void sort(Object[] a) {
try {
Arrays.sort(a);
} catch (StackOverflowError e) {
// Gone quadratic and array was too long.
// Falling back to slower but safer sort,
// hoping that array is not damaged.
HeapSort.sort(a);
}
}
}
Could also catch OOME there but I don't know if it's wise.
-Jeff
