The other reply thread is great and has a SmarterBubbleSort implementation -- it's important to note that the early stopping rule is an enhancement, not vanilla

The other reply thread is great and has a SmarterBubbleSort implementation -- it's important to note that the early stopping rule is an enhancement, not vanilla bubble sort (I had to learn both, maybe curricula these days jumps straight to the smarter version?), but even so it complicates the implementation and still isn't ever better than vanilla insertion sort. Here is insertion sort void insertion_sort(int s[], int n) { int i, j; for (i = 1; i < n; i++) { for (j = i; j > 0 && s[j] < s[j-1]; j--) { swap(&s[j], &s[j-1]); } } } You can even improve this further (some improvements have new names), however its base form is not in the class of bad algorithms to never use. Besides Bubble sort, Bogosort comes to mind. And there are of course nice algorithms to use if your data works for them, Radix sort comes to mind. Knowing your data is good advice, knowing never to use bubble sort is also good.