On 10/8/11 10:11 AM, Xinok wrote:
On 10/7/2011 12:42 PM, Xinok wrote:
Hi, it's been years since I've posted here. I just wanted to share
something I worked on, a new sorting algorithm. It's a variant of merge
sort, but much more memory efficient with only a small loss in
performance. The most similar algorithm I know of is Timsort.
I had need for a stable sorting algorithm, but the performance of stable
sort in Phobos is terrible. This pretty much left merge sort, which has
good performance but requires O(n) space. That persuaded me to design my
own sorting algorithm.
Here, you can find the code, details of the algorithm, and benchmarks
(introSort is the unstable sort in Phobos).
http://www.neowin.net/forum/blog/422/entry-3737-sort-algorithm-complete/
To follow up on my original post, I wrote a text file which explains the
algorithm in detail. The most important thing to understand is the
"range swap", which I tried to explain as simply as possible.
http://cl.ly/0H193k2s0G2T1A002v3I/xinokSort.txt
Nice writeup, but I found it quite difficult to get into. What would
help is anchoring it with already known stuff (if it's not, the reader
must assume it's unrelated, which makes things difficult). So it would
be great if you compared and contrasted range swap with the in-place
merge algorithm (e.g. http://www.sgi.com/tech/stl/inplace_merge.html),
STL's stable sort (http://www.sgi.com/tech/stl/stable_sort.html) which
is O(N log(N) log(N)), and possibly with std.algorithm.bringToFront.
Simply presenting a stylized implementation of swap range would be helpful.
Also there are a few oddities in the text:
* "- Constant additional memory (one memory allocation per thread)" ->
the parenthesis does not sustain the point. There could be one memory
allocation but it might allocate a non-constant amount.
* All discussion about tail call optimization is unneeded. Tail calls
can be converted trivially to loops, so don't mention anything. Feel
free to convert to loops if needed.
Andrei
