efficient partial sort in Python ?

[Dan Stromberg]

On Tue, Aug 19, 2014 at 4:05 PM, Dan Stromberg <drsalists at gmail.com> wrote:
> When you use heapq, are you putting all the values in the heap, or
> just up to n at a time (evicting the worst value, one at a time as you
> go)?  If you're doing the former, it's basically a heapsort which
> probably won't beat timsort.  If you're doing the latter, that should
> be pretty good.

It just occurred to me that evicting the highest value each step of
the way might be expensive with a traditional heap (since the value at
the largest array index isn't necessarily the largest).  I've
experimented with doing this using a treap a bit:
http://stromberg.dnsalias.org/~strombrg/treap/  You might try that.