My 2 cents worth.

The issue in my mind is that qsort cannot sort while the data is being read off the disk.  By using a balenced tree the data can be sorted into partitions while it is being read, then these partitions can be merged.

IMHO this will give the best performance.

I wrote the code to do this years ago and if people want to play with it I suppose I can GPL it.  A language conversion would be required because I didn't have C available - but the code is runnable in its present form.

Last time I benched it was against the DEC system sort routines on a VAX 7800 and it ran quite a bit faster... and this is in spite of the fact that I had to do many rather UGLY things to fit this code into the constraints I had...  IE - it had to run under 5 operating systems including MS-DOS and like I said - it <unfortunatly> Isn't written in C.
Mon, 14 Apr 2003 10:24:11 -0600
terr@terralogic.net
Re: No merge sort?