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As you can see from the comments in the thread, sorting is not a simple one-size fits all, job. Far from it.

Given your original question, Quicksort is the overall general answer - but if it's not...

Thanks much for your post - I have to say that I've never heard of "bottom up" merge sort before.

Now I'd like to test it out on both integer and record sorting, against an optimized Quicksort.
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The answer is Quicksort. It has the same complexity, but better "data locality". Which is to say, that with the common PC architecture, it's able to use the cache a little better.

Using the cache...