What is the fastest way to sort a large(ish) array of numbers in JavaScript

Question

In my application, I need to sort large arrays (between 100,000 and 1,000,000) of random numbers.

I\'ve been using the built in array.sort(comparisonFunction)<

Answer 1

There are sort implementations that consistently beat the stock .sort (V8 at least), node-timsort being one of them. Example:

var SIZE = 1 << 20;

var a = [], b = [];

for(var i = 0; i < SIZE; i++) {
    var r = (Math.random() * 10000) >>> 0;
    a.push(r);
    b.push(r);
}

console.log(navigator.userAgent);

console.time("timsort");
timsort.sort(a, (x, y) => x - y);
console.timeEnd("timsort");

console.time("Array#sort");
b.sort((x, y) => x - y);
console.timeEnd("Array#sort");

Here are some timings from different browsers I have around (Chakra anyone?):

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/53.0.2785.113 Safari/537.36
timsort: 256.120ms
Array#sort: 341.595ms

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_6) AppleWebKit/602.2.14 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/10.0.1 Safari/602.2.14
timsort: 189.795ms
Array#sort: 245.725ms

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.11; rv:51.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/51.0
timsort: 402.230ms
Array#sort: 187.900ms

So, the FF engine is very different from Chrome/Safari.