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What is a bubble sort good for?

I'am sure every algorithm has its advantage and disadvantage, so how about buble sort compared to other sorting algorithm? (ofcourse I hope the answer is other than "easy to learn")

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marked as duplicate by Georg Fritzsche, EvilTeach, ShreevatsaR, Loki Astari, Ben Voigt Jul 18 '10 at 2:21


Being abused in interview questions :) –  blowdart Jul 18 '10 at 0:25
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_sort –  Aryabhatta Jul 18 '10 at 0:33
This is a duplicate of stackoverflow.com/questions/276113/…. There are over 13 SO posts with bubble sort in the title. Read those. –  cape1232 Jul 18 '10 at 0:36
Every Algorithm? What should BogoSort (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogosort) be good at? Wasting time? Being an example? - Still I think your question has a valid core: is there any situation where bubble sort would be a good choice? –  peterchen Jul 18 '10 at 1:08
It's far from true that every algorithm has its advantages. Many algorithms are utterly pointless (perhaps they made sense for a while, until someone invented a better one, or perhaps, like Bogosort, they have no purpose other than to amuse, and be ridiculously inefficient. Still, like @peterchen said, your question is valid enough. :) –  jalf Jul 18 '10 at 1:24
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7 Answers

up vote 11 down vote accepted
  1. It is easy to implement for linked lists, since you always swap adjacent nodes while traversing left to right repeatedly.
  2. Bubble sort is a stable sort.
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Agree with both of your points. They're not unique to Bubble sort though; a Merge sort is also stable and works well with linked lists. –  Mark Ransom Jul 18 '10 at 2:11
Also often good for already-mostly-sorted data. Very often you can do one O(n) pass and know that the data is fully sorted. There's a few related sorts (e.g. ripplesort) that handle the cases when the (very few) out-of-order items might need to move either direction. All aweful for large inputs except in very special cases, of course. And as a rule, it's quicker to sort the (usually new) unordered items separately then merge anyway. –  Steve314 Jul 18 '10 at 3:57
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Performance-wise, Bubble Sort is not very good (O(n^2)). Here are some of it's advantages:

  • Bubble Sort is very easy to write correctly (if you're doing something quick and dirty then it might be easier just to use bubble sort).

  • Memory consumption is very low (because it is an in-place sort, unlike Merge Sort for arrays)

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It's simple enough to play it out in school without it ending in a total mess: "If your left neighbor is taller than you, please switch places."

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As an added bonus, I think it is O(N) in this scenario :) –  Jeremy Friesner Jul 18 '10 at 1:40
@Jeremy - only by exploiting parallel processing. –  Steve314 Jul 18 '10 at 4:02
Yup ... I wish there were more situations where each data item in the data set is also a data processor! –  Jeremy Friesner Jul 18 '10 at 16:41
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It's easier to program. Even seasoned programmers get quick sort, heap sort, and merge sort wrong. Also it does not consume an extra log(n) to O(n) in stack space. Although you can implement heap sort non recursively.

Basically the algorithms are this

O(n^2) worst case performance

Basically this is slower....

  • Insertion O(n^2) but performs O(n) on already sorted lists
  • Bubble sort: similar but not always programmed with the early exit to allow for this. Generally this one seems to be the more popular one to discuss and throw out in interviews
  • Selection Sort: there is generally no early exit so this always takes O(n^2)

O(n * lg(n))

Generally the fastest sorting algorithms for general sorting when you don't know anything about the input (this has actually been proven to be a lower bound on sorting without knowing anything about the input):

  • Quick Sort: It is usually the faster of the high speed algorithms, but mistakes in picking the pivot can make it degenerate to O(n^2), and then it is worse than say Bubble/Insertion/Selection because it also consumes stack space. It takes more advantage of cache locality so generally performs better than some of the other alternatives. It needs LG(n) space to O(n) space for calls depending upon how well it pivots.
  • Merge Sort: O(n*log(n)) performance, but requires O(n) extra space in. Generally not as fast as quick sort. Generally requires lg(n) extra space as well for calls...
    Heap Sort: Requires no extra space, can be implemented non recursively, but sort of bounces around the array so it is not as good on the cache as the others. If implemented recursively requires lg(n) extra space for calls.

O(n) sorts
If you know something about your inputs you can often sort better than O(n*lg(n)). Basically look up Radix Sort, Bucket Sort, Counting Sort, etc.. There are many schemes. Generally if it is possible to sort using one of these you should....

*Other Sorts: * There are many other sorts available. Things like shell sort, etc... the ones above are the more common.

But anyway in reality the faster algorithms are often harder to implement. If someone told me to sort these numbers in 20 minutes without a library, I'd probably write selection sort. The more complex ones are easier to get wrong. And often require additional space. You have to evaluate the complexity, space, and time tradeoffs. Many programming languages have built in sorting libraries.

Also one other thing to be careful of is whether a sort is stable or not. Basically if you have A, C, D, C, G, C will each C appear in order, or will the last C appear before one of the other C's. This is important if you are sorting on multiple fields. Ie if you sort by First Name and then last name (Alex Rodriguez, Jane Rodriguez, Betty Rodriguez)...first sort you'd get (Alex R, Betty R, Jane R). Second sort if it is stable you will get Alex R, Betty R, Jane R. If it is not stable, you could get any order. Generally Bubble and Insertion are easy to implement to be stable. Heap Sort and Quick Sort usually aren't stable. Merge sort is easy to implement as stable. This also factors into choices....

Also if you don't know O(n) notation, basically it is an upper bound on how many computations it takes. To give you an idea, to sort 20 items you are looking at around 400 operations with O(n^2) while with O(n * lg(n)) you are looking at 20 * approx 4.3 so around 86 operations. And for lg(n) you are looking at around 4.3. Anyway the larger the number gets the bigger this difference is. 10000 items is 133000 operations for n*lg(n) and 100000000 for n^2. For large lists using the slower sorts starts to become impractical. And of course O(n) is just 10,000. The number of operations is not exactly those numbers, but they speak to how fast it grows. Ie with just lg(n) you grow from 4.3 for 20 to 133000. With n you grow from 20 to 10000 with n * lgn you grow from 86 to 133000 and with n^2 you grow from 400 to 100000000. So basically as your lists get bigger the slower ones will reach a point where they can't do them but the faster ones can.

Anyway having put it all in context I see the following advantages to bubble sort:

  1. Easy to implement and get right.
  2. Doesn't consume extra space for array or procedure calls (assuming you don't implement it recursively)...so good for low memory environments
  3. It reads the array sequentially so this is good for the memory cache
  4. Someone else mentioned it is easy to use this to sort linked lists
  5. It is easy to make this stable
  6. Some interviewer will no doubt mention this at some point

Anyway in libraries Quick Sort and Stable Merge sort seem to be the most popular.

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Bubble sort is the fastest way to sort a list of three items. With very few exceptions, all sorts degenerate into a form of bubble sort for lists of three.

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A bubble sort of three items can do (one) too many swaps. (EDIT oops - no it can't). That is, for very small sets, the best you can do is enough comparisons to determine which permutation you're dealing with, then swap the smallest item directly into position 1, then the next smallest directly into position 2 etc (ie O(n) swaps). Well - strictly, you might be able to do even better by doing the swaps in different (predetermined) orders depending on which permutation you're dealing with. –  Steve314 Jul 18 '10 at 4:28
On second thoughts - the permutation thing matches the bubble sort for three items. Both may require three swaps. –  Steve314 Jul 18 '10 at 4:31
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BubbleSort is faster than QuickSort (and almost every other sort) on already sorted lists ;-)

QuickSort's best-case performance is O(N log N), BubbleSort's is O(N) !

Other than this exotic, I'd have to agree with Donald Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming, Vol. 3: Sorting and Searching:


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Realistically you would never use it for anything other than very small lists. For a sufficiently small list the low overhead can make it superior to the fancier sorts. I'd never use it for more than a dozen items.

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It's not uncommon for a quicksort to switch to bubblesort (or similar) for very small partitions. Since every large partition is subdivided, a large quicksort ultimately requires a lot of small bubblesorts - a quicksort can spend more time bubblesorting than quicksorting. –  Steve314 Jul 18 '10 at 4:38
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