About 

sortchk is a simple test suite I wrote in order to measure the costs (in terms of needed comparisons and data moves, not in terms of time consumed by the algorithm, as this is too dependend on things like type of computer, programming language or operating system) of different sorting algorithms. The software is meant to be easy extensible and easy to use.

It was developed on NetBSD, but it will also compile and run well on other systems, such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Darwin, AIX and Linux. With little work, it should also be able to run on foreign plattforms such as Microsoft Windows or MacOS 9.

Usage 

The program has four options:

For example, run

sortchk -a bubblesort,quicksort,heapsort -o ascend -n 100

and you'll see quicksort loose, whereas heapsort does a not that bad job.

Download 

The binary packages are statically linked and compiled with -O2, which is quite O.K. for this program. If you have any problems using the contributed binary packages, please contact the given maintainer instead.

NOTE: Version 0.1 includes a Quicksort algorithm named Quicksort (Vahrenhhold). This was a mistake, the algorithm was originally introduced by Nico Lomuto and is commonly know as Lomuto partition algorithm. Version 0.2 of the software therefore uses the name Quicksort (Lomuto) instead.

Feedback 

I'm very interested in getting feedback on this test suite. If you find bugs or add new sorting algorithms, please drop me a note.

Test runs 

To measure costs for huge data arrays, you need a lot of patience. I've done some test runs and put the results here for people to look at. Its interesting to see that heapsort is that fast (in terms of comparisons and data moves), so why do people always think of quicksort first?