Sorting algorithm

[Xinok]

On 10/8/2011 12:47 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> Nice writeup, but I found it quite difficult to get into. What would
> help is anchoring it with already known stuff (if it's not, the reader
> must assume it's unrelated, which makes things difficult). So it would
> be great if you compared and contrasted range swap with the in-place
> merge algorithm (e.g. http://www.sgi.com/tech/stl/inplace_merge.html),
> STL's stable sort (http://www.sgi.com/tech/stl/stable_sort.html) which
> is O(N log(N) log(N)), and possibly with std.algorithm.bringToFront.
>
> Simply presenting a stylized implementation of swap range would be helpful.

I didn't mean for this text to be anything official. I just felt it was 
important to provide an explanation of my algorithm so others could 
better understand my algorithm and it's implications. That's all. 
There's also the issue of, "what if I'm not the first?" I couldn't find 
anything similar to the "range swap", but that doesn't mean it didn't 
already exist.

Writing papers isn't my forte, I'm a self taught programmer. So if my 
algorithm ever gains popularity, I'll let the experts deal with it.

> Also there are a few oddities in the text:
>
> * "- Constant additional memory (one memory allocation per thread)" ->
> the parenthesis does not sustain the point. There could be one memory
> allocation but it might allocate a non-constant amount.

I thought it was important to clarify that. My algorithm is easy to 
parallelize, but it does require allocating a unique block of memory for 
each thread. It is relatively constant as well, as it would make sense 
that the number of running threads matches the number of cores in the 
hardware. The only reason to allocate a non-constant amount is if you 
include the optimization I mentioned, to allocate O(n/1024) space.

> * All discussion about tail call optimization is unneeded. Tail calls
> can be converted trivially to loops, so don't mention anything. Feel
> free to convert to loops if needed.

I think it's an issue worth addressing though. Some programmers might 
assume that, because it's a variant of merge sort, stack overflows won't 
be an issue. When I originally implemented my algorithm, I didn't use 
tail calls and I had problems with stack overflows on partially sorted 
data. So it is an issue.