Registration is now open for CppCon 2023! The conference starts on October 1 and will be held in person in Aurora, CO. To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, we’re posting some upcoming talks that you will be able to attend this year. Here’s another CppCon future talk we hope you will enjoy – and register today for CppCon 2023!

A Long Journey of Changing std::sort Implementation at Scale

Monday, October 2 • 14:00 - 15:00

by Danila Kutenin

Summary of the talk:

Sorting algorithms have been improving for almost 50 years now with claims of better efficiency and various properties but the question of adopting a new one at scale is often left behind. At Google we replaced std::sort in the LLVM libc++ library to test it for hundreds of thousand calls. We faced many challenges which we had been fixing for 2 years including golden tests, efficiency problems, undefined behavior and broken production. In this talk we want to cover issues on how we improved debugging, benchmarking, how much better a new implementation was compared to the old one and what we have learned on this journey of improved sorting.