I worked in embedded development and sorting large lists of files was a surprisingly big bottleneck for many of our projects because of the very slow microcontr

I worked in embedded development and sorting large lists of files was a surprisingly big bottleneck for many of our projects because of the very slow microcontrollers. Even worse we couldn't cache the results because of no memory. So I was tasked to improve that and I had to write inline assembly to abuse specific cpu instructions that could effectively do much more char comparisons per clock cycle. We ended up not using it because of the usual reasons (not portable, hard to maintain) and our customers had to live with the 20-30s delay when entering a large directory, versus the 5-6s my code achieved. (Sorry this has little to do with the topic at hand, I don't really know when sorting becomes a problem on a multicore 5ghz cpu)