Re: Change Emacs 'sort' API to use three-way comparison

[Lars Ingebrigtsen]

Paul Eggert <address@hidden> writes:

> One infelicity I noticed in the recent change to 'sort' in the trunk
> is that the new implementation calls its predicate twice for each
> comparison.  This is because the Lisp API says the comparison function
> returns a boolean (nil or non-nil), whereas qsort_r wants the
> comparison function to return a ternary value (-1, 0, or 1). If the
> predicate is expensive, the new Fsort can be twice as slow as the old.
> We could tune it but I don't see how to get it any faster than 1.5x
> slower than before, assuming random input and an expensive comparison
> function.

Uhm.  Why has somebody introduced a new sort that's slower than the old
sort?

As somebody who sorts a lot of things in Emacs, that sounds kinda
... bad.

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