I understand why people actually using these huge data sets see this as a bug but personally I don't agree. Consider how hard programming becomes when you have

I understand why people actually using these huge data sets see this as a bug but personally I don't agree. Consider how hard programming becomes when you have to take into account integer overflows even for a /single addition/ of array indices. Our mainstream programming languages are build around the assumption that indices don't overflow and I would rather use the binary sort code as argument to support this than to support the argument that bug free code is really hard. The real lesson in my opinion is to stop using 32 bit integers in big data applications. Which unfortunately doesn't seem trivial in Java.