Arthur Kay

In my continuing series on JavaScript algorithms, I thought it might be fun to examine two methods for implementing “mergesort”.

Mergesort is essentially a “divide and conquer” technique, where the algorithm breaks an array into smaller pieces. Each of the small pieces is sorted and then recursively merged back together.

Mergesort is an attractive option for sorting large arrays because it is fast… and we’ll look at its efficiency in a moment. However, it also has a disadvantage: the algorithm requires more memory than Selection Sort and Insertion Sort, so for systems in which memory usage must be kept low mergesort may not be a good option. Continue reading →