Hello Haskell-Cafe, lately I've been playing around with sorting. I discovered that Data.List.sort is not as optimized I thought. At least not for random lists. I think we should consider adding a Data.List.Sort package to hackage (Similar to Data.List.Split) that offers a wide variety of sorting algorithms. I don't consider myself to be a very advanced Haskell programmer, but I could come up with a Mergesort that beats List.sort, time- and spacewise.
On my machine List.sort takes ~10 sec, mergeSort 7, qs 4 (compiled with -O2). List.sort eats too much ram to sort 20.000.000 ints, my algorithms don't. QuickCheck says my implementations are correct. I suppose List.sort does clever things for nonrandom lists, that I didn't consider? I had a look at the source, but I couldn't find anything obvious. Adrian