A banged out a sort visualizer inspired by this video.

Mostly I had just never personally implemented a quicksort. I first googled "quicksort explained" which bought up this AWESOME video that extremely clearly explains the algorithm. So I implemented that.

But, then I found this page which shows a bunch of algorthms and it has them detailed very tersely. Their quicksort is nothing like the one in the video above. Their's moves a random `pivot` through the array going only to the right whereas the one above uses the leftmost element as its `pivot`, takes it out of the array and uses left and right pointers to move stuff before and after the pivot finally inserting the pivot in the space found.

The LR one appears to be much faster than the right only one. I also don't quite get the point of choosing a random pivot. I suppose it's to try to avoid the worst case which I think is an inversely sorted array and starting from element #1. I'm sure somewhere on the net explains why a random pivot is best for that other algorithm. I'm a little worried there's a bug in my implementations of the non LR quicksort because it takes so long on the "equal" array example (top right).

Anyway, I added a bunch more including the quicksort 3 way partition.

I also added cycle times but they probably make no sense currently. It's basically 2 cycles for a load, 3 for a store, 1 for a compare though a compare includes a load so it's 3 cycles. But cache hits are not currently taken into account nor are a few array accesses in the algos. Maybe the only thing you care about is array accesses and cache misses in which case I should remove the various set, cmp, copy, swap stuff and just add have get/put and count cycles and try to guess cache hits. For example right now array[i] = array[j] is considered 1 load and 1 store so that's 5 cycles. if array[i] > value is considered 3 cycles. Etc.. The visualization shows 10 cycles worth per frame.

Anyway, if you missed the link at the top the visualization is here.

As a side note, after having worked on a browser for 4 years I wish all algorithm samples were written in JavaScript and online. I suppose it's arguably only been until relatively recently that browsers had enough features to do this kind of stuff but still, why would I want to download a bunch of source and figure out how to compile it when I can express the same thing in the browser and make it accessible on way more devices and have immediate access? Sadly this page that has all the algorithms isn't actually running them in JavaScript, it's just displaying animated gif files!?!???!!