Re: Change Emacs 'sort' API to use three-way comparison

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> writes:

> One infelicity I noticed in the recent change to 'sort' in the trunk
> is that the new implementation calls its predicate twice for each
> comparison.  This is because the Lisp API says the comparison function
> returns a boolean (nil or non-nil), whereas qsort_r wants the
> comparison function to return a ternary value (-1, 0, or 1). If the
> predicate is expensive, the new Fsort can be twice as slow as the old.
> We could tune it but I don't see how to get it any faster than 1.5x
> slower than before, assuming random input and an expensive comparison
> function.

Can someone give an executive summary why we would be using a "qsort_r"
here?

"sort" sorts a list.  There is really not much of a point in not using a
mergesort here, resulting in a stable sort and requiring only a binary
comparison function.

Quicksorts make sense when sorting arrays.

-- 
David Kastrup