I remember being a bit disappointed with how Julia fared against Chapel in their comparison of standard library sort implementations a couple of years ago, and julia with threaded sort + mergesort was nowhere near the chapel implementation in terms of performance.
Now with LLMs, it’s easy to translate between languages, so I was curious how a julia implementation of the same algorithm (would perform.
The results from a quick benchmark on my laptop are quite encouraging:
Strings can also be sorted faster this way:
Finally, I also wondered if applying some of this could be useful to speed up dataframes operations. And there seems to be some potential here as well, although not as dramatic as for pure sort:
This was just a quick experiment, but in case anyone wants to try it out, the code is available here.