What is a bubble sort good for? [closed]

Answer 1

Mostly nothing. Use QuickSort or SelectionSort instead...!

Answer 2

I can't resist responding to any remarks on bubble sort by mentioning the faster (seems to be O(nlogn), but this is not really proven) Comb Sort. Note that Comb sort is a bit faster if you use a precomputed table. Comb sort is exactly the same as bubble sort except that it doesn't initially start by swapping adjacent elements. It's almost as easy to implement/understand as bubble sort.

Answer 3

It is the sort I use most often actually. (In our project, we cannot use any external libraries.)

It is useful when I know for sure that data set is really small, so I do not care one bit about speed and want shortest and simplest code.

Bubble is not the lowest you can go. Recently, I was in a situation when I needed to sort exactly three elements. I wrote something like this:

// Use sort of stooge to sort the three elements by cpFirst

SwapElementsIfNeeded(&elementTop, &elementBottom);
SwapElementsIfNeeded(&elementTop, &elementMiddle);
SwapElementsIfNeeded(&elementMiddle, &elementBottom);

*pelement1 = elementTop;
*pelement2 = elementMiddle;
*pelement3 = elementBottom;

Answer 4

It's quick and easy to code and (nearly impossible to do wrong). It has it's place if you're not doing heavy lifting and there's no library sorting support.

Answer 5

It's good for small data sets - which is why some qsort implementations switch to it when the partition size gets small. But insertion sort is still faster, so there's no good reason to use it except as a teaching aid.

Answer 6

I once used it for a case where the vast majority of the time it would be sorting two items.

The next time I saw that code, someone had replaced it with the library sort. I hope they benchmarked it first!