If I understand the talk correctly, this is just a way to assign objects a lazy list of shorts, and then sort them by that list using a recursive bucket sort.

If I understand the talk correctly, this is just a way to assign objects a lazy list of shorts, and then sort them by that list using a recursive bucket sort. I like his system for generating these lists when there's nested data. However, it's often as simple as concatenating the lists generated by the fields of the object. The O(n) time bound isn't surprising to me, since each byte of information in the input can lead to at most one scan through the bucket array. Actual performance is obviously a lot better. I'd still like to see this integrated into a more mainstream language. It would be an interface where all you have to implement is a generator that concatenates the generators of the fields of your class in the desired order. I know how to do any combination of fixed-width numbers, structs, unions, strings, but I'm not sure how to handle tree-like structures, and something with cycles... I can't even think of a regular comparator for. I assume this isn't this simple, so what am I missing?