What makes insertion sort faster than bubble in practice?

Fewer operations — shifts over swaps, early outs on sorted tails. Benchmarks show 10-20x edge on random data.

Is counting sort always the fastest?

No, only for small integer ranges (k << n). Beyond that, aux space balloons.

General purpose, yes — until you hit recursion depth limits or need stability.

📦 Open Source

General purpose, yes — until you hit recursion depth limits or need stability.

You're a dev staring at a sluggish sort. Theory says they're all O(n²), but one crawls while another zips. This C benchmark shows why.

theAIcatchup Apr 08, 2026 3 min read

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#C benchmark #C benchmarks #C programming #O(n²) complexity #algorithm benchmarks #algorithm performance #sorting algorithms #time complexity

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Originally reported by dev.to