[Python-Dev] Drastically improving list.sort() for lists of strings/ints

[Mark Dickinson]

On Sun, Sep 11, 2016 at 7:43 PM, Elliot Gorokhovsky
<elliot.gorokhovsky at gmail.com> wrote:
> So I suppose the thing to do is to benchmark stable radix sort against timsort and see if it's still worth it.

Agreed; it would definitely be interesting to see benchmarks for the
two-array stable sort as well as the American Flag unstable sort.
(Indeed, I think it would be hard to move the proposal forward without
such benchmarks.)

Apart from the cases already mentioned by Chris, one of the situations
you'll want to include in the benchmarks is the case of a list that's
already almost sorted (e.g., an already sorted list with a few extra
unsorted elements appended). This is a case that does arise in
practice, and that Timsort performs particularly well on.

-- 
Mark