Resort to sort

So the past few days I've been playing around with some simple algorithms. I'm not 'professionally' trained, and most of my experience has been with what I've seen in code or have implemented myself. Does that make me less of a developer for not being classically trained? Maybe, maybe not.

In particular I've been playing around with some of the sorting algorithms. Stuff like Bubble sort, Selection sort, Insertion sort, and of course Quicksort.

My first task as been to study the algorithm and look at whatever pseudo-code or explanation is presented for the algorithm. Study and understand it. Then is to walk away from any computer or anything, take a little break. After a short time I then pull out a pen and paper and write down a Dart version of the code. I write it out in front of me without referring to APIs, or without referencing the material.

I later then enter that code (or re-write it) into the Dart editor in a simple test file I have. I run it, fix my bugs, and run it again. My test file contains all of the various sorts as I learn them, it then prints out the sorted list and the time it took to complete (using a Stopwatch). I also have a function to create a list of X size filed with values from Random.nextInt.

Being able to easily create a random list of a determined size is nice, as it allows me to easily increment the list size as I choose and see the differences in performance. For instance it took a list of almost 5000 items for Quicksort with the two isolates to be faster than the main-thread version of Quicksort. (See Edit note below)

Many of the algorithms I've implemented are without performance improvements and are far from the most efficient versions available. One thing I've noticed though is List.sort((a, b) => a - b); has generally been one of the best performing algorithms, in lists of up to 10,000 items.

However as I mentioned none of the algorithms has been tuned for best performance or memory usage and are just the 'simple' versions of the algorithms just for my own learning purposes and less for actual performance comparisons. The performance comparisons are more of a visual reference to the Big O Notation for myself.

[Edit:]So I was wrong. I had poorly implemented my Quicksort with Isolates. Very poorly. It was a hodgepodge of Futures and a custom callback. I went through and cleaned it up and changed it so it returned a Future instead of calling a callback. Once I did that I saw an over 10x speed increase in the Quicksort with Isolates version and it and was about the same speed as the Main-threaded Quicksort for lists below 500 items. And faster for lists greater than 500 items. This has more to do with my unfamiliarity with Isolates than with the algorithms themselves.[/Edit]

For those who may be interested, you can the current version of the file here: https://github.com/butlermatt/sorting_dart. As time goes by, I will be adding more algorithms (with comments) as I learn them myself. Again please recall these are not optimized in any way and are only presented as-is, as proof of concept.
In time I may add some optimized versions of algorithms myself as I progress. Keep in mind however this is primarily a learning project and not designed for use. They may be (and are) buggy.