Re: Is high-speed sorting impossible with Ruby?

I've thrown various solutions up on github here:

https://github.com/seifertd/sort-a-million

Feel free to fork and add more.  Below is the result of running all the
solutions I have up there so far.  My takeaway from all of this: stick with
normal Ruby idioms (see the standard_ruby.rb solution) and you will get
pretty close.  The rest of the solutions are just optimizing for the
specific problem and doing this kind of thing is only necessary when you
really need the seconds.  Also, compiled languages beat interpreted
languages, but we all knew that, didn't we? We don't use Ruby for its
performance after all.

$ ./run_all.sh
Generating input file
time ruby count_occurences.rb < million.txt > million_sorted.txt

real 0m1.242s
user 0m1.148s
sys 0m0.088s
time ruby chunked_reads.rb < million.txt > million_sorted_2.txt

real 0m3.484s
user 0m2.703s
sys 0m0.779s
time ruby standard_ruby.rb < million.txt > million_sorted_3.txt

real 0m1.260s
user 0m1.156s
sys 0m0.101s
time ruby build_strings.rb < million.txt > million_sorted_4.txt

real 0m4.431s
user 0m3.834s
sys 0m0.567s
time ruby build_strings_2.rb < million.txt > million_sorted_5.txt

real 0m1.135s
user 0m1.039s
sys 0m0.091s
time sed -n "2,$p" million.txt | sort -n > million_bash.txt

real 0m1.968s
user 0m1.862s
sys 0m0.094s
CONFIRM