Feb 16, 2014

Benchmarked Sort::Maker's each sort style for my specific purpose

I use various internal and external APIs to build my services. An external API returns content something like below:
{
    "status": 1,
    "error_msg": '',
    "result": {
        "foo1": { .... },
        "foo2": { .... },
        "foo3": { .... },
        "foo4": { .... }
    }
}
After retrieving this, I have to sort the result in result.foo1, result.foo2, ..., result.foo100 order. I'm wondering why they don't return this in array, but I must face it as long as the provider is returning values in this way. Although Perl Best Practices insists on using Sort::Maker, I implemented this in my way because this sort wasn't that complicated.
my %tmp_cache; # for orcish maneuver
my @sorted_keys = sort {
    ( $tmp_cache{$a} //= $a =~ s/\A foo(\d+) \z/$1/xr ) <=>
    ( $tmp_cache{$b} //= $b =~ s/\A foo(\d+) \z/$1/xr )
} keys %{ $content->{result} };

# then sorted results are stored in stash to be displayed
$c->stash->{results} = [ map { $content->{result}->{$_} } @sorted_keys ];
Today, I benchmarked each sort type provided by Sort::Maker and found that using Sort::Maker was much faster. The code is as below. It was a bit surprising that my original method with orcish maneuver is13% slower than Sort::Maker's one with orcish maneuver. Needless to say, other sort types are much faster. So my conclusion is that even relatively simple sort should be implemented with Sort::Maker to increase readability, maintenancibility and performance.