this is a small sub that can be used in situations where you have a large array to be sorted, but you really need only the first N elements of the sorted array.

you can think of it as something like the SQL SELECT * FROM foo ORDER BY bar LIMIT 10 (MySQL, Postgres) or SELECT TOP 10 * FROM foo ORDER BY bar (MSSQL).

of course, this has been thought of as an optimization, but to deserve the name of optimization it should really be implemented in C (XS/Inline/whatever you want). it could still perform quickier than a full sort, I suspect, particularly if your comparison function is very expensive.

SYNOPSIS

my @topten = sort_top(10, sub { $a <=> $b }, @huge_array);
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sub sort_top {
    my($top, $func, @arr) = @_;
    my @top = sort $func @arr[0..$top-1];
    for my $i ($top..$#arr) {    
        my $x = -1;
        for (my $t = $#top; $t >= 0; $t--) {
            local ($a, $b) = ($arr[$i], $top[$t]);
            last if($func->() == 1);
            $x = $t;
        }
        if($x != -1) {
            splice(@top, $x, 0, $arr[$i]);
            pop(@top);
        }    
    }    
    return @top;    
}
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