If the array to be sorted is very large, a Guttman Rosler Transform (GRT) may be advantageous (see A Fresh Look at Efficient Perl Sorting and Understanding transformation sorts (ST, GRT), the details):

>perl -wMstrict -le
"my @ra = qw(abc1 abc32 abc64 abc8 abc16);
 ;;
 my $wide = 15;
 my @sorted =
   map unpack(qq{x$wide a*}),
   reverse sort
   map sprintf('%0*d%s', $wide, m{ (\d+) \z }xms, $_),
   @ra
   ;
 ;;
 print qq{@sorted};
"
abc64 abc32 abc16 abc8 abc1
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See also Sort::Maker.