In practice, you often need the IP address in packed form anyway, so there's work reuse. That makes the solutions that pack that much more efficient.

If not, the following would be even faster 

unpack_ipv4s( sort { $a <=> $b } pack_ipv4s( @ips ) );

[download]

Where unpack_ipv4s and pack_ipv4s are efficient XS functions.

Of course, it would be even faster if you rewrote the sorter to work with numbers directly instead of handling SVs containing numbers.

It's curious that you only used unpack 'N' in combination with split and that you never tried split without unpack 'N'.

In reply to Re: RFC: Sorting IPv4 addresses by ikegami
in thread RFC: Sorting IPv4 addresses by bv

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