Question

The title speaks for itself ….

Does choice of container affects the speed of the default std::sort algorithm somehow or not? For example, if I use list, does the sorting algorithm just switch the node pointers or does it switch the whole data in the nodes?

Answer 1

I don’t think std::sort works on lists as it requires a random access iterator which is not provided by a list<>. Note that list<> provides a sort method but it’s completely separate from std::sort.

The choice of container does matter. STL’s std::sort relies on iterators to abstract away the way a container stores data. It just uses the iterators you provide to move elements around. The faster those iterators work in terms of accessing and assigning an element, the faster the std::sort would work.