Maintainers

Steven Ross

BOOST SORT

Introduction

The goal of the Boost Sort Library is provide to the users, the most modern and fast sorting algorithms.

This library provides stable and not stable sorting algorithms, in single thread and parallel versions.

These algorithms do not use any other library or utility. The parallel algorithms need a C++11 compliant compiler.

Detailed boost API documentation also available.

Single Thread Algorithms

Algorithm	Stable	Additional memory	Best, average, and worst case	Comparison method
spreadsort	no	key_length	N, N sqrt(LogN),	Hybrid radix sort
			min(N logN, N key_length)
pdqsort	no	Log N	N, N LogN, N LogN	Comparison operator
spinsort	yes	N / 2	N, N LogN, N LogN	Comparison operator
flat_stable_sort	yes	size of the data / 256 + 8K	N, N LogN, N LogN	Comparison operator

spreadsort is a novel hybrid radix sort algorithm, extremely fast, designed and developed by Steven Ross. (paper)
pdqsort is a improvement of the quick sort algorithm, designed and developed by Orson Peters. (paper)
spinsort is a stable sort, fast with random and with near sorted data, designed and developed by Francisco Tapia.
flat_stable_sort stable sort with a small additional memory (around 1% of the size of the data), provide the 80% - 90% of the speed of spinsort, being fast with random and with near sorted data, designed and developed by Francisco Tapia. (paper)

Parallel Algorithms

Algorithm	Stable	Additional memory	Best, average, and worst case
block_indirect_sort	no	block_size * num_threads	N, N LogN , N LogN
sample_sort	yes	N	N, N LogN , N LogN
parallel_stable_sort	yes	N / 2	N, N LogN , N LogN

Sample_sort is a implementation of the Samplesort algorithm done by Francisco Tapia.
Parallel_stable_sort is based on the samplesort algorithm, but using a half of the memory used by sample_sort, conceived and implemented by Francisco Tapia.
Block_indirect_sort is a novel parallel sort algorithm, very fast, with low additional memory consumption, conceived and implemented by Francisco Tapia. (paper)

The block_size is an internal parameter of the algorithm, which in order to achieve the highest speed, changes according to the size of the objects to sort according to the next table. The strings use a block_size of 128.

object size (bytes)	1 - 15	16 - 31	32 - 63	64 - 127	128 - 255	256 - 511	512 -
block_size (number of elements)	4096	2048	1024	768	512	256	128

Installation

This library is include only.
Don't need to link with any static or dynamic library. Only need a C++11 compiler
Only need to include the file boost/sort/sort.hpp

Author and Copyright

This library is integrated in the Boost Library.

Distributed under the Boost Software License, Version 1.0.