Sorting algorithms visualizer

There can be a lot more to consider than just the number of comparisons (which a lot of sort algorithm texts concentrate on if they fixate on one thing) which can have an effect on which sort is better for a given circumstance.

If an exchange is very expensive then you might prefer an order of magnitude more comparisons in order to reduce the number of exchanges needed. The structure of your data makes a difference too especially if you are trying to sort in-place with little or no extra memory: an exchange by insertion is very efficient with a linked list (just rearrange the links) but can be very expensive with a fixed array (shifting the last element to the front involves moving every other element up one).

Sometimes the comparison might be rather expensive at times: if you are trying to sort data stored over many distributed nodes then you need to be careful to pick an algorithm that can constrain itself as much as possible to the local data on each node.

Concurrency can be a big issue even if not running on distributed data: some algorithms are much more "lock heavy" than others.

And even for a single threaded local only sort on modern CPUs cache use can make a big difference: an algorithm that you intuit should run quickly because it can move objects very far at each step might not be all that good because it much more rarely sees cache hits when looking at data than one that works on smaller local chunks in its inner loop.

No one method fits every use: sometimes you want an exchange class sort, sometimes insertion class, sometimes , ...

Thanks, really interesting!

Whether items with same sorting key will remain in the same order or not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorting_algorithm#Stability

This is a quite unique take on sorting visualizations:

A folk dance group made sorting algo visualizations via Hungarian / Romanian folk dances :)

https://www.youtube.com/user/AlgoRythmics/videos