radix-sort

I am trying to implement radix sort for integers, including negative integers. For non-negative ints, I was planning to create a queue of 10 queues correspondingly for the digits 0-9 and implement the LSD algorithm. But I was kind of confused with negative integers. What I am thinking now, is to go ahead and create another queue of 10 queues for them and separately sort them and then at the end, I will gave 2 lists, one containing negative ints sorted and the other containing non-negative ints. And finally I would merge them. What do you think about this? Is there more efficient way to handle

This is a long text. Please bear with me. Boiled down, the question is: Is there a workable in-place radix sort algorithm ? Preliminary I've got a huge number of small fixed-length strings that only use the letters “A”, “C”, “G” and “T” (yes, you've guessed it: DNA ) that I want to sort. At the moment, I use std::sort which uses introsort in all common implementations of the STL . This works quite well. However, I'm convinced that radix sort fits my problem set perfectly and should work much better in practice. Details I've tested this assumption with a very naive implementation and for

Why quicksort(or introsort), or any comparison-based sorting algorithm is more common than radix-sort? Especially for sorting numbers. Radix-sort is not comparison based, hence may be faster than O(n logn). In fact, it is O(k n), where k is the number of bits used to represent each item. And the memory overhead is not critical, since you may choose the number of buckets to use, and required memory may be less than mergesort's requirements. Does it have to do with caching? Or maybe accessing random bytes of integers in the array? Two arguments come to my mind: Quicksort/Introsort is more