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Quicksort is an efficient, general-purpose sorting algorithm.Quicksort was developed by British computer scientist Tony Hoare in 1959 [1] and published in 1961. [2] It is still a commonly used algorithm for sorting.
An example of stable sort on playing cards. When the cards are sorted by rank with a stable sort, the two 5s must remain in the same order in the sorted output that they were originally in. When they are sorted with a non-stable sort, the 5s may end up in the opposite order in the sorted output.
qsort is a C standard library function that implements a sorting algorithm for arrays of arbitrary objects according to a user-provided comparison function. It is named after the "quicker sort" algorithm [1] (a quicksort variant due to R. S. Scowen), which was originally used to implement it in the Unix C library, although the C standard does not require it to implement quicksort.
In computer science, quickselect is a selection algorithm to find the kth smallest element in an unordered list, also known as the kth order statistic.Like the related quicksort sorting algorithm, it was developed by Tony Hoare, and thus is also known as Hoare's selection algorithm. [1]
Nevertheless, the simplicity of this approach makes it attractive, especially when a highly-optimized sorting routine is provided as part of a runtime library, but a selection algorithm is not. For inputs of moderate size, sorting can be faster than non-random selection algorithms, because of the smaller constant factors in its running time. [4]
As another example, many sorting algorithms rearrange arrays into sorted order in-place, including: bubble sort, comb sort, selection sort, insertion sort, heapsort, and Shell sort. These algorithms require only a few pointers, so their space complexity is O(log n). [1] Quicksort operates in-place on the data to be sorted.
For example, the quicksort algorithm can be implemented so that it never requires more than nested recursive calls to sort items. Stack overflow may be difficult to avoid when using recursive procedures since many compilers assume that the recursion stack is a contiguous area of memory, and some allocate a fixed amount of space for it.
A Merge sort breaks the data up into chunks, sorts the chunks by some other algorithm (maybe bubblesort or Quick sort) and then recombines the chunks two by two so that each recombined chunk is in order. This approach minimises the number or reads and writes of data-chunks from disk, and is a popular external sort method.