I am running only Perl 5.10 now and can't easily benchmark vs older versions, but in the transition from earlier versions, I did.

I figure that the basic sort algorithm just got a lot smarter and reduced the number of comparisons. Some other Monks here can probably explain why sorting got faster to a mind-numbing detail. But I think some problems like the worst case qsort of array is already in order have gone away. I'm just saying that sorting performance in general did increase, and noticeably so(even ST sorts).

These various techniques like "Schwartzian Transform" are still applicable and they still improve performance when doing very large sorts.

How much any performance difference matters depends upon the application -- how much stuff you have to sort and of course how often the sort runs!

Update: The big Perl sorting improvement was 5.8, not 5.6. As it turned out, I skipped Active State's 5.8 release and wound up jumping from 5.6 to 5.10 when enough modules were available for 5.10 for it to make sense for me. 5.8 was released 7/18/2002, and 5.10 12/14/2008. So I think my upgrade to 5.10 happened approx late 2009. Sounds like almost all of the improvements that I saw performance wise were due to changes in 5.8.

In reply to Re^3: Custom sort with string of numbers by Marshall
in thread Custom sort with string of numbers by linuxfan

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