What's faster: inserting into a priority queue, or sorting retrospectively?

Question

What\'s faster: inserting into a priority queue, or sorting retrospectively?

I am generating some items that I need to be sorted at the end. I was wondering, what is

Answer 1

There are a lot of great answers to this question. A reasonable "rule of thumb" is

• If you have all your elements "up front" then choose sorting.
• If you will be adding elements / removing minimal elements "on the fly" then use a priority queue (e.g., heap).

For the first case, the best "worst-case" sort is heap sort anyway and you'll often get better cache performance by just focusing on sorting (i.e. instead of interleaving with other operations).