title: Why bother with comparison sorts?
body: <p>Algorithms like Timsort, Quicksort &amp; Mergesort dominate the "<em>real world</em>" sorting methods. The case for these comparison sorts is quite practical — they've been shown to be the most performant, stable, multipurpose sorting algorithms in a wide variety of environments.</p>
  
  <p>However, it seems like nearly everything that we would sort on a computer are countable / partially ordered. Numbers, characters, strings, even functions are amenable to some meaningful non-comparison sorting method. A candidate here is Radix sort. In general it will behave faster than O(n*log(n)), beating the theoretical comparison sort limit of n * log(n) by a wide margin in many cases with a complexity of O(K*n) -- K being the number of bits that are required to represent a particular item. </p>
  
  <p>What gives?</p>