Introduction/Direct Translation

The quicksort quoted in Introduction isn't the "real" quicksort and doesn't scale for longer lists like the c code does.

http://programming.reddit.com/info/5yutf/comments/

Here are some points to how the "real" quicksort would look in haskell.

Lennart Augustsson has a quicksort entry on his blog which is pure (no unsafe):

http://augustss.blogspot.com/2007/08/quicksort-in-haskell-quicksort-is.html

Another version (uses System.IO.Unsafe), is below.

There is also a "parallel" quicksort at

http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~dsg/gph/nofib/

roconnor claims that in haskell the "real" quicksort is really a treesort:

http://programming.reddit.com/info/2h0j2/comments

Unfortunately none of the above "real" quicksorts seems to compile as given, when copy/pasted into ghci. Can someone fix? The "parallel" quicksort gave error "unknown package concurrent" when I ran make in quicksort/gransim.

Has anyone got a functioning "real" quicksort that works on copy/paste?

The program below is working very very slowly. It's probably slowsort... :o)

import Control.Monad (when)
import Control.Monad.ST
import Data.Array.ST
import Data.Array.IArray
import Data.Array.MArray

qsort :: (IArray a e, Ix i, Enum i, Ord e) => a i e -> a i e
qsort arr = processArray quickSort arr

processArray :: (IArray a e, IArray b e, Ix i)
             => (forall s. (STArray s) i e -> ST s ()) -> a i e -> b i e
processArray f (arr :: a i e) = runST $ do
    arr' <- thaw arr :: ST s (STArray s i e)
    f arr'
    unsafeFreeze arr'

quickSort :: (MArray a e m, Ix i, Enum i, Ord e) => a i e -> m ()
quickSort arr = qsort' =<< getBounds arr
  where
    qsort' (lo, hi) | lo >= hi  = return ()
                    | otherwise = do
        p <- readArray arr hi
        l <- mainLoop p lo hi
        swap l hi
        qsort' (lo, pred l)
        qsort' (succ l, hi)

    mainLoop p l h  | l >= h    = return l
                    | otherwise = do
        l' <- doTil (\l' b -> l' < h  && b <= p) succ l
        h' <- doTil (\h' b -> h' > l' && b >= p) pred h
        when (l' < h') $ do
            swap l' h'
        mainLoop p l' h'

    doTil p op ix = do
        b <- readArray arr ix
        if p ix b then doTil p op (op ix) else return ix

    swap xi yi = do
        x <- readArray arr xi
        readArray arr yi >>= writeArray arr xi
        writeArray arr yi x

This uses various extensions to make the types ridiculously general, but the actual algorithm (quickSort) is plain Haskell.

A more specific/direct translation (neither this nor the C version is polymorphic) is offered by Daniel Fischer, who reports that this version runs within 2x of the C version:

import Data.Array.Base (unsafeRead, unsafeWrite)
import Data.Array.ST
import Control.Monad.ST

myqsort :: STUArray s Int Int -> Int -> Int -> ST s ()
myqsort a lo hi
   | lo < hi   = do
       let lscan p h i
               | i < h = do
                   v <- unsafeRead a i
                   if p < v then return i else lscan p h (i+1)
               | otherwise = return i
           rscan p l i
               | l < i = do
                   v <- unsafeRead a i
                   if v < p then return i else rscan p l (i-1)
               | otherwise = return i
           swap i j = do
               v <- unsafeRead a i
               unsafeRead a j >>= unsafeWrite a i
               unsafeWrite a j v
           sloop p l h
               | l < h = do
                   l1 <- lscan p h l
                   h1 <- rscan p l1 h
                   if (l1 < h1) then (swap l1 h1 >> sloop p l1 h1) else return l1
               | otherwise = return l
       piv <- unsafeRead a hi
       i <- sloop piv lo hi
       swap i hi
       myqsort a lo (i-1)
       myqsort a (i+1) hi
   | otherwise = return ()