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by Avshalom
1122 days ago
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Off Topic: "Laying out icons on a grid should be an inherently linear operation" it doesn't seem mentioned in the HN thread the cause here is probably the same thing O(n^2): sorting. laying out icons is only linear if the icons are read in the order that they're placed. It's been a long time since I used windows regularly but my memory is the default placement is by creation time. So if they're read off disk by filename (or some sort of hash) they'd need to be sorted by timestamp. |
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Reasons? Firstly, you’d have to know the entries are sorted. For that, you need an API that tells you that or hard-code information about file systems in your code. They may exist, but I’m not aware of any file system API that provides that information.
Secondly, the file system may not return the names sorted in the locale you want to sort them in.
Thirdly, the sorting code used in the file system may contain a bug. Once file systems are out there, you can’t fix them (happened in one of Apple’s file systems. HFS, IIRC)
Lastly, modern GUIs tend to sort file names containing numbers non-alphabetically, so that, for example “file 2.jpg” gets sorted before “file 12.jpg”.
So, I think it’s easier to always sort. I would pick an algorithm that works well when items are mostly sorted at the start, though.