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

Nikolaus Rath Nikolaus at rath.org
Thu Sep 15 13:42:50 EDT 2016 
On Sep 13 2016, Tim Peters <tim.peters at gmail.com> wrote:
> [Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu>]
>>> Tim Peters investigated and empirically determined that an
>>> O(n*n) binary insort, as he optimized it on real machines, is faster
>>> than O(n*logn) sorting for up to around 64 items.
>
> [Nikolaus Rath <Nikolaus at rath.org>]
>> Out of curiosity: is this test repeated periodically on different
>> architectures? Or could it be that it only ever was true 10 years ago on
>> Tim's Power Mac G5 (or whatever he used)?
>
> It has little to do with architecture, but much to do with the
> relative cost of comparisons versus pointer-copying.  Near the end of
>
> https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/Objects/listsort.txt
[...]

Ah, that makes sense, thanks! 

Best,
-Nikolaus

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