alt Hacker NewsYou normally measure runtime of a sorting algorithm in terms of the number of comparisons it has to do.
Obviously real-world performance depends on other things as well.
You normally measure runtime of a sorting algorithm in terms of the number of comparisons it has to do.
Obviously real-world performance depends on other things as well.
Not “normally”, but “in computer science” and even then, mostly “in the past” and even then, only “typically” (there are sorting algorithms that make zero comparisons. See for example https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~paton/readings/Old/fall01/LINEAR-...)
All other people live in the real world, and care about real-world performance, and modern computer scientists know that.