400x Sorting Speedup by Switching a.localeCompare(b) to (ab?1:0))

Answer 1

It's difficult to know the fastest sort without seeing the data you are sorting. But jsperf has lots of good tests showing the performance differences between types of sorting: http://jsperf.com/javascript-sort/45 http://jsperf.com/sort-algorithms/31

However none of these account for localised strings, and i'd imagine there is no easy way to sort localised strings and localeCompare is probably the best solution for this.

Looking at mozilla reference is says: "When comparing large numbers of strings, such as in sorting large arrays, it is better to create an Intl.Collator object and use the function provided by its compare property." https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/String/localeCompare

But going to the Intl.Collator reference it shows that is not support for firefox/safari https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Collator

you could try using some of the options on localCompare to speed up the performance. But I've just done a quick test changing the sensitivity level and it seems like it won't improve the performance:

list.sort(function(a, b) {
  return a.localeCompare(b, {sensitivity:'base'});
});

http://jsperf.com/sort-locale-strings