[donovanr]

Sedgewick's 1978 paper[0] on implementing quicksort has some interesting hand optimizations of the assembly code -- loop rotating, unrolling, etc. I wonder if modern compilers do the same?

[0] http://penguin.ewu.edu/cscd300/Topic/AdvSorting/Sedgewick.pd...

[pertymcpert]

Yep, loop rotation and unrolling are done very commonly.