Thank you!
In my own experience, I've needed just two orderings, ascending and descending according to the natural order. For descending order, I need an extra step.
mutableIntList.sortThis().reverseThis();
I'm curious about your use-case if you can share more details. I suppose it could be useful to sort numbers by their absolute value or something similar.
Unfortunately, we can't integrate an implementation derived from GPL code. That problem aside, I think this is a good idea and can make a great contribution.
From: collections-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:collections-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Kevin Connor Arpe
Sent: Wednesday, March 22, 2017 12:04 PM
To: collections-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [collections-dev] Sort primitives with a comparator
Hello,
I recently started using GS/Eclipse collections. It is like a breath of fresh air. Thank you for all of your hard work.
In the primitive collections, such as MutableIntList, I see a sortThis() method. I looked at the impl and I see it calls Arrays.sort() directly on the underlying array. I did not see a version that takes a primitive comparator.
It has always been a sore spot with me that Java does not natively support Arrays.sort(<PrimitiveArray>, <PrimitiveComparator>).
I was considering to derive from the TimSort that Java 8 uses and contribute, but I don't know if there is a license conflict. If GPL2 + linking exception doesn't work, is there another impl of sorting for generics that can easily be adapted
for primitives?
Finally, I looked at the Java 8 impl for primitive array sorting. Adapting that code to accept a primitive comparator looks much more challenging.
Kindly let me know what you think.