[PATCH 1/6] shell32/autocomplete: Introduce helpers for proper enumeration

[Gabriel Ivăncescu]

On Wed, Oct 24, 2018 at 8:03 PM Huw Davies <huw at codeweavers.com> wrote:
>
> I don't think this is an issue.  Let's just use qsort for now and
> if it turns out to be needed you can roll your own sort later on.
>
> The idea is to make things easy to review, that way you'll stand
> much more chance of getting your patches in.
>
> Huw.
>

Well honestly, this would already be an issue for me (as a user, in
usability) if I used this on a non-merge-sort qsort system that
doesn't use glibc, I can imagine there's surely other people with my
use cases...

I'm talking mostly about performance here, not even the stability of
the sort (merge sort minimizes the amount of comparisons, so it's
*much* faster in this situation than for example quicksort, since
that's the bottleneck). Most of those large lists also have very long
prefixes that expand (e.g. foo\bar\baz\bla\x\y\z\...) so that
compounds the performance problem (string comparisons).

Yeah, it's probably best to start with a qsort to simplify the patch
for now, but I still think a merge sort should definitely be used
eventually in a later patch, just for consistency on all platforms
instead of it being sluggish on those not using merge sort (e.g.
taking 2 seconds instead of 1 second is a large difference).