[xorcist]

Ummm.. Sure, but what's happening here is that FreeBSD stores a list in a file not in the desired order, then sorts it before use.

It seems to be any prolonged discussion about which sorting algorithm should be used is sort of skipping the elephant. Why is the list not sorted to begin with?

Without that basic knowledge it isn't very productive to focus on implementation details, no matter how fun the sorting exercise is. Deleted code is fast code.

[thomasmg]

I was talking about "exponential algorithms" in general, and about business logic. I know FreeBSD isn't business logic, but low-level kernel code. I don't know the details of the FreeBSD problem.