[bjourne]

Is there any evidence of timsort being superior in practice? I've been looking for benchmarks but on synthetic ones with randomized data, both mergesort and quicksort handily beats timsort. The belief about timsort's superiority seem to me to be more about Tim Peters being a very well-respected developer than performance data.

[pjscott]

On completely random data, Timsort is just a mergesort with some extra bookkeeping. Its advantage is on arrays that have sorted subarrays of non-trivial size, which is often the case with real data.