Introduction Quicksort is most people’s go to sort function and that’s not a bad thing because it’s a really good general purpose sorting algorithm. A good implementation is really fast and, being an in place algorithm, it uses very little memory. The big drawback of Quicksort is that it’s non-stable. This means there are some situations where using Quicksort a deal breaker and can’t be used. Enter Mergesort which is stable....
Introduction qsort, heapsort, mergesort, bsearch, and many more search and sort functions all take a compar argument to determine the sorting order of elements in an array. The compar function takes the form int (*compar)(const void *, const void *). The compar function’s parameters are the address of two of the elements in the array. The parameters will need to be dereferenced before they can be compared. Any type of value can have a compar function written for it and it can be used to sort an array of any type....
Introduction Quicksort is one of the most common sorting algorithms and one of the most efficient. It’s so common that it’s part of C89. That said, it’s still good to know how it works, its strengths, and it’s weaknesses. It takes as a divide and conquer approach to sorting. An element is selected as a pivot point. The elements are sorted against the pivot so all elements less than the pivot are on the left side and greater than elements are on the right....