gecko-dev/xpcom/ds/nsQuickSort.h
Jens Stutte 989d33f031 Bug 1839051 - Use std::sort for nsTArray and deprecate NS_QuickSort. r=emilio,nika,janv,dom-storage-reviewers
Until now we used our own, well-aged C-style implementation of quick sort, based on code from 1992/93. Apart from being old (which is not bad as such), this code had some
disadvantages, namely:

- It was not typesafe and invocations could not be optimized by inlining.
- [Quick Sort](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicksort) has a worst case performance of O(n<sup>2</sup>).
- Quick Sort can recurse deeply and thus cause stack overflows.
- On Windows, [Control Flow Guard](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/secbp/control-flow-guard) inspects any function invocation via function pointers to check if the called function was known at compile time. This comes with a [notable overhead](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1842079) when calling the compare function repeatedly.

`std::sort` and `std::stable_sort` are preferred and have an optimal, guaranteed worst case performance.

Differential Revision: https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/D181339
2023-12-11 06:53:25 +00:00

48 lines
1.6 KiB
C++

/* -*- Mode: C++; tab-width: 8; indent-tabs-mode: nil; c-basic-offset: 2 -*- */
/* vim: set ts=8 sts=2 et sw=2 tw=80: */
/* This Source Code Form is subject to the terms of the Mozilla Public
* License, v. 2.0. If a copy of the MPL was not distributed with this
* file, You can obtain one at http://mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/. */
/* We need this because Solaris' version of qsort is broken and
* causes array bounds reads.
*/
#ifndef nsQuickSort_h___
#define nsQuickSort_h___
#include "nscore.h"
#ifdef __cplusplus
extern "C" {
#endif
/**
* You most probably want to not use this but std::sort or std::stable_sort
* It will be removed eventually from the tree, see bug 1839052.
*
* Quicksort is recursive without limits and thus may make overflow the stack.
* And while being close to optimal for randomized data for some edge cases
* it can reach quadratic performance O(n*n) instead of O(n*log(n)).
*
* Parameters:
* 1. the array to sort
* 2. the number of elements in the array
* 3. the size of each array element
* 4. comparison function taking two elements and parameter #5 and
* returning an integer:
* + less than zero if the first element should be before the second
* + 0 if the order of the elements does not matter
* + greater than zero if the second element should be before the first
* 5. extra data to pass to comparison function
*/
[[deprecated("Use std::sort or std::make/sort_heap instead.")]] void
NS_QuickSort(void*, unsigned int, unsigned int,
int (*)(const void*, const void*, void*), void*);
#ifdef __cplusplus
}
#endif
#endif /* nsQuickSort_h___ */