Comparison between timsort and quicksort

Question

Why is it that I mostly hear about Quicksort being the fastest overall sorting algorithm when Timsort (according to wikipedia) seems to perform much better? Google didn\'t s

Answer 1

TimSort is highly optimization mergesort, it is stable and faster than old mergesort.

when comparing with quicksort, it has two advantages:

1. It is unbelievably fast for nearly sorted data sequence (including reverse sorted data);
2. The worst case is still O(N*LOG(N)).

To be honest, I don't think #1 is a advantage, but it did impress me.

Here are QuickSort's advantages

1. QuickSort is very very simple, even a highly tuned implementation, we can write down its pseduo codes within 20 lines;
2. QuickSort is fastest in most cases;
3. The memory consumption is LOG(N).

Currently, Java 7 SDK implements timsort and a new quicksort variant: i.e. Dual Pivot QuickSort.

If you need stable sort, try timsort, otherwise start with quicksort.