[bloppe]

Sorting is not a niche topic. Anybody who majored in CS (which is a ton of people these days) will read the abstract and most of the paper thinking "Wow, I can't believe they discovered something better than O(N log N)" because that's usually what people mean when they say "better sorting algorithm". What they discovered here is effectively a new compiler optimization. They should present it as such instead of calling it a new sorting algorithm.

But ya, discovering a new compiler optimization automatically is kinda cool.

[saiojd]

I see your point. I just went over the abstract again and I totally agree.

[elcomet]

I hope people majoring in CS will not think that, as they learned that n log n is the theorically best complexity for a sort algorithm. They will rather think that they found an algorithm with better constants in front of n log n.

[Zacharias030]

true that

[recursive]

70% better than O(N log N) is still O(N log N).

[ummonk]

It's 70% better than O(1). The algorithms it found are for sort3, sort4, and sort5, which were poorly optimized in LLVM's libc++.

[pclmulqdq]

It may have also laundered those from open-source code that wanted to optimize sort3, sort4, and sort5.

[qumeric]

Tbh people who majored in CS are supposed to know that it was proven long ago that better than O(N log N) sorting (in general case) is impossible.

[Dylan16807]

> because that's usually what people mean when they say "better sorting algorithm"

Is it really? I've heard of a few "better sorting algorithms" and it's never meant that in my experience.

[cubefox]

When people say "sorting algorithm" they mean something like bubble sort or merge sort.