has anyone looked at burstsort
https://sourceforge.net/projects/burstsort
they claim that "Copy-Burstsort is a sorting algorithm for strings that
is cache-efficient. Burstsort and its variants are much faster than
Quicksort and Radixsort especially on large datasets. Copy-Burstsort
works best for sorting short strings such as genomes and words"
if the speed claim is true, and there are no other bad effects, like for
example very bad memory use, we could try to talk the author into
allowing us to include it under BSD licens (currently it is GPL)
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Hannu