Rather than, or at least in addition to, raw measured speed on a specific piece of hardware, which is often affected in hard to understand ways by niche optimis

Rather than, or at least in addition to, raw measured speed on a specific piece of hardware, which is often affected in hard to understand ways by niche optimisation choices and nuances of specific hardware, I actually really like the choice to report how many comparisons your algorithm needed. For example Rust's current unstable sort takes ~24 comparisons on average for each of 10^7 truly random elements to sort them all, but if instead all those elements are chosen (still at random) from only 20 possibilities, it only needs a bit more than five comparisons regardless of whether there are 10^3 elements or 10^7. Unlike "On this Intel i6-9402J Multi Wazoo (Bonk Nugget Edition) here are my numbers" which is not very useful unless you also have the i6-9402J in that specific edition, these comparison counts get to a more fundamental property of the algorithm that transcends micro architecture quirks which will not matter next year.