At Wed, 25 Feb 2004 23:02:48 +0000 (UTC), Stephen Hahn <stephen.hahn@s-u-n.c-o-m> writes:

>> In practice GNU sort runs rings around Solaris sort. I don't know why
>> Sun doesn't switch to GNU sort as the default. It'd be better for
>> everybody concerned.
>
> I think "rings" is a little strong today;

Yes, you're probably right. Sorry, I guess that I hadn't tried
Solaris "sort" recently. I installed the latest "sort" patch for
Solaris 9 (114363-02, dated January 27). It does seem to spruce up
Solaris "sort" so that it's quite competitive, even in ASCII locales.
Well done. (Perhaps this'll prod me to shake loose some spare time
for GNU sort to make it run faster again. :-)

I wish that we wouldn't need to have two different people doing
essentially the same thing. A sure waste of effort in my opinion.
Perhaps you can talk your management into GPL'ing Solaris sort?
I'm not entirely joking here.

> I would certainly concede it for 5.6 and 5.7, where our approach
> to internationalization was *ahem* naive.

GNU sort is still pretty naive about i18n, I'm afraid. Most serious
sorters use the C locale for big stuff anyway, so there hasn't been
much motivation to speed it up.

> At one point, Solaris sort was the only choice if you wanted to
> sort in locales where ASCII order is not correct; GNU sort may now
> collate appropriately in such locales.

It does try to. (No doubt there are bugs. Isn't i18n wonderful? :-)