ska_sort

Hang on, you can't just quote MB/s numbers for an O(n log(n)) sort. What length were these tests run at? The code size might not end up quite as good (also requires malloc), but a branchless merge sort is a contender for a fast and lightweight sort. Just published, tiny-sort-rs[0] cites 632 bytes and looks like ~350MB/s at 1e4 elements on Zen 3. In my tests, my own pisort[1] benches a little over twice as fast as LongSort, but it uses sorting networks as the base case so it's like 5KB. It's roughly based on piposort[2] which has more complicated recursion but a simpler base case. 400 MB/s seems a bit slow for a radix sort on that hardware: I'm hitting those numbers on my i5-6200U, which has less than half the clock rate, with my own radix sort. Recommend checking ska_sort_copy from [3] as it has about the same performance. [0] https://git

That is true - the benchmarks mostly focus on random cases, although there are a few benchmarks with "mostly sorted" arrays (sorted arrays with sqrt(n) random swaps). If the input array consists of several concatenated ascending or descending sequences, then timsort is the best. After all, timsort was specifically designed to take advantage of that particular case. Pdqsort performs respectably, too, and if you have more than a dozen of these sequences or if the sequences are interspersed, then it starts winning over timsort. Anyways, both pdqsort and timsort perform well when the input is not quite random. In particular, pdqsort blows introsort (e.g. typical C++ std::sort implementations) out of the water when the input is not random[1]. It's pretty much a strict improvement over introsort. Likewise, timsort (at least the variant implemen