From The Swift Programming Language:
The Sort Function Swift’s standard library provides a function called sort, which sorts an array of values of a known type, based on the output of a sorting closure that you provide. Once it completes the sorting process, the sort function returns a new array of the same type and size as the old one, with its elements in the correct sorted order.
The sort function has two declarations.
The default declaration which allows you to specify a comparison closure:
func sort<T>(array: T[], pred: (T, T) -> Bool) -> T[]
And a second declaration that only take a single parameter (the array) and is "hardcoded to use the less-than comparator."
func sort<T : Comparable>(array: T[]) -> T[]
Example:
sort( _arrayToSort_ ) { $0 > $1 }
I tested a modified version of your code in a playground with the closure added on so I could monitor the function a little more closely, and I found that with n set to 1000, the closure was being called about 11,000 times.
let n = 1000
let x = Int[](count: n, repeatedValue: 0)
for i in 0..n {
x[i] = random()
}
let y = sort(x) { $0 > $1 }
It is not an efficient function, an I would recommend using a better sorting function implementation.
EDIT:
I took a look at the Quicksort wikipedia page and wrote a Swift implementation for it. Here is the full program I used (in a playground)
import Foundation
func quickSort(inout array: Int[], begin: Int, end: Int) {
if (begin < end) {
let p = partition(&array, begin, end)
quickSort(&array, begin, p - 1)
quickSort(&array, p + 1, end)
}
}
func partition(inout array: Int[], left: Int, right: Int) -> Int {
let numElements = right - left + 1
let pivotIndex = left + numElements / 2
let pivotValue = array[pivotIndex]
swap(&array[pivotIndex], &array[right])
var storeIndex = left
for i in left..right {
let a = 1 // <- Used to see how many comparisons are made
if array[i] <= pivotValue {
swap(&array[i], &array[storeIndex])
storeIndex++
}
}
swap(&array[storeIndex], &array[right]) // Move pivot to its final place
return storeIndex
}
let n = 1000
var x = Int[](count: n, repeatedValue: 0)
for i in 0..n {
x[i] = Int(arc4random())
}
quickSort(&x, 0, x.count - 1) // <- Does the sorting
for i in 0..n {
x[i] // <- Used by the playground to display the results
}
Using this with n=1000, I found that
It seems that the built-in sort method is (or is close to) quick sort, and is really slow...