Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Sean1708 2349 days ago
Not really, no. The only parallel is that you're putting things into buckets, but other than that they're very different algorithms.
1 comments
shawnz 2349 days ago
Wouldn't the complexity, number of movements, etc also be the same? What's the difference?

Why wouldn't a radix sort approach suffer from the same disadvantages as the hash unique approach (e.g. locality of reference)?

link
Sean1708 2343 days ago
It's worth giving the Wiki page a quick read, it's very accessible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radix_sort

TL;DR: I guess the hash unique approach is technically a radix sort in base-64 if you hash the inputs before applying the radix sort, but a realistic radix sort will use far fewer buckets giving it much better cache locality and won't unnecessarily hash the buckets.

Also it's possible to write a radix sort that doesn't use any extra indirection, but that's a much more complex implementation and I doubt it really has any performance benefits.

link