[hinkley]

Here’s a different take: if you find yourself needing to sort a lot of data all the time, maybe you should be storing it sorted in the first place.

Stop faffing about with college text book solutions to problems like you’re filling in a bingo card and use a real database. Otherwise known as Architecture.

I haven’t touched a radix sort for almost twenty years. In that time, hardware has sprouted an entire other layer of caching. I bet you’ll find that on real hardware, with complex objects, a production-ready Timsort is competitive with your hand written radix sort.

[mschuetz]

I develop programs that take unsorted data as input, and sort them as part of the processing... I haven't touched a database in 10 years, because I do graphics programming, nothing that needs a database. Also, I don't actually use radix sort but a hand written CUDA counting sort that beats the crap out of radix sort for my given use cases, since counting sort is often used as part of radix sort, but simple counting sort is all I need.

> and use a real database.

I'm not going to use a database to store tens of billions of 3D vertices. And I'm not going to use a database to sort them, because it's multiple times, probably orders of magnitude faster to sort them yourself.

It's weird to impose completely out-of-place suggestions onto someone who does something completely different to what you're thinking of.