timsort

[Joshua Bloch]

Chris,

On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 2:51 AM, Christopher Hegarty -Sun Microsystems
Ireland <Christopher.Hegarty at sun.com> wrote:

> Hi Martin,
>
> Sorry for joining the party late...
>
> I think adding the system property should take care of the compatibility
> issues, at least giving the user the ability to revert to the old behavior
> if they so choose.
>
> I have a few minor comments ( if these issue have been discussed already I
> apologize ):
>
> 1) Should we update the Arrays class description and appropriate sort
>   methods to now refer to timsort instead of saying: "The sorting
>   algorithm is a modified mergesort...". I know this is not strictly
>   necessary, but you must have considered it already, right?


No.  I totally missed it.  Good catch!


>
> 2) With the addition of @throws IllegalArgumentException, this
>   condition cannot be met with the old merge sort right, i.e. running
>   with -Djava.util.Arrays.useLegacyMergeSort=true. So we're saying
>   that all bets are off when running with this property set?


Others have already commented on this; this @throws clause makes no
promises, but calls out a (desirable) behavior that the new implementation
might exhibit (and the old one never will) when the user has violated a
fundamental contract (hence all bets are off).

          Josh

P.S.  Thanks all, and especially Martin, for shepherding this work into the
JDK!
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/core-libs-dev/attachments/20090707/feb76705/attachment.html>