[rodneyrehm]

While I doubt a javascript-space sorting implementation runs any faster than a C++ implementation could, there are some implementations around, http://millermedeiros.github.com/amd-utils/array.html#sort for example.

[simonster]

JavaScript sorting algorithms can definitely be faster if you are passing a comparator function to Array.prototype.sort, depending on the JS engine. See https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.dev.tech.js-en..., where Boris Zbarsky shows that translating quick sort into JavaScript produces an algorithm that runs 7X faster than Array.prototype.sort(function(a, b) { return a-b; }) in SpiderMonkey (which uses an insertion + merge sort in C++ for Array.prototype.sort) because of the expense of making calls from C++ to JS. Chrome's sort algorithm is written in JavaScript so it doesn't suffer from this.