faster sort?

[pakastin]

Is Array.prototype.sort already max fast?

[bttmly]

Not sure, but either way it might be nice to have a fast NOT in-place sort, since it would be faster than slicing then sorting.

[phpnode]

yeah it's definitely worth investigating this. I really hate that sort operates in-place, suspect we can beat it with an immutable implementation.

[pakastin]

Yes, I really hate in-place sorting as well.. Hope you fix something out :)

[bttmly]

I guess question no. 1 is whether or not we want a stable sort (I'd say yes)

[josdejong]

+1

Some sorting algorithms are fast for small arrays whilst others performs way better for large arrays in JavaScript (see the suggestion of @zhak55 in josdejong/mathjs#268). It may be interesting to use a different algorithm when dealing with either a small or a large array.

[sairion]

node-timsort seems to be worth looking in, perf-wise http://mziccard.me/2015/08/10/node-timsort-fast-sorting-nodejs/

[pakastin]

Yeah, that one seems promising!

[pakastin]

..although that's almost 1000 lines of code :/

[Yaffle]

https://gist.github.com/Yaffle/62addec7c78052ab72cc - merge sort - "slow", but stable

[wbrickner]

You could ship with a tiny build system in the repository which bundles different optimizations (like the somewhat expensive 1k dynamic sorting library mentioned above) so you only get what you need, minimizing size.

[munizart]

Or, alternatively, you could ship sort in a different module, something like @fast/sort, maybe taking it further to slicing even more the fast project with @fast/array, @fast/object, @fast/string and @fast/function