Neat! That said, std::sort is a template function, so you can pull the source (e.g., take the one from libc++) and change the comparator to return an int. You w

Neat! That said, std::sort is a template function, so you can pull the source (e.g., take the one from libc++) and change the comparator to return an int. You will still get all the benefits of inlining and optimizations from lack of type erasure, while performing only one comparison :) Edit: Actually quicksort only needs a stable boolean comparator (e.g., < or >) to determine order. So the number of invocations to the comparator is the same for both qsort and std::sort. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicksort http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicksort