this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2024
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Time complexity isn't even associated to the size of the list. Amazing!

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[–] sxan@midwest.social 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

This should be taught in computer classes, as an illustration that O(1) does not necessarily mean "fastest".

[–] dev_null@lemmy.ml 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

It's not O(1) though. There is still a normal sorting algorithm sorting this list, it's just inside the OS scheduler.

[–] sxan@midwest.social 2 points 4 months ago

I didn't mean to imply that it was; I was referring to countless developers I've worked with over the years who thought hash maps were the fastest memory storage structure because they are generally O(1); they've mostly been ignorant of the fact that it's only true for sufficiently small values of "1".

[–] sus@programming.dev 1 points 4 months ago

the environment or operating system will ultimately have to use a sorting algorithm with a normal time complexity to determine the order of events (or it can give up and sort them incorrectly once the time resolution is not high enough)