I've grown to like the plain C version. It has a very modular interface (doesn't require the sorted items to implements a certain protocol, i.e. "operator<"), a

I've grown to like the plain C version. It has a very modular interface (doesn't require the sorted items to implements a certain protocol, i.e. "operator<"), and doesn't compile new code for each new type. (Often code size is the most important). I think the worst case I measured is a factor of 2 in std::sort vs qsort on bare integers. On larger types it will be less. That's acceptable to me. Sorting is seldom the bottleneck (it's only important to do sort in many situations).