Re: [xml] Profiling and possible speed improvements

[Bjorn Reese <breese mail1 stofanet dk>]

Daniel Veillard wrote:

>   Hum, this definitely sounds interesting, one should add the following

Before switching to Quick Sort, I would strongly suggest that empirical
data is collected on typical input sizes of stylesheets.

Shell's Sort was chosen because it is fast on small to medium data sets
(this was one of the improvements we made for XSLTMark). IMHO, we should
be cautious about gaining better performance of large data sets at the
cost of typical data sets.

Also, there are plenty of alternatives to the two mentioned sorting
algorithms. Further examples, of which some may be interesting to
examine, can be found at:

  http://www.cs.ubc.ca/spider/harrison/Java/sorting-demo.html
  http://cs.smith.edu/~thiebaut/java/sort/demo.html
  http://www.diku.dk/users/jyrki/Experimentarium/

There is, however, another good reason to replace Shell's Sort. It does
not preserve the original order of equal entries.