This code provides a comparison between a variety of sorts, mostly in Python/Cython. Check out the "graph.ps" rule for a performance comparison. Of the variants of funnel sort tested, it does indeed appear that using an exponent of 1/3 is best, as suggested by the theory. That's a somewhat satisfying result, and suggests that perhaps timsort should be modified to use funnelsort instead of merge sort in the large to get cache obliviousness. Looking at the Cython-generated C code, it appears there's some potential for speed improvements by writing a C extension module manually, instead of autogenerating C from Cython. On the other hand (Tue Jun 29 13:37:50 PDT 2010), the Cython folks believe that Cython tends to produce better C code than most people would write by hand if you give it type declarations. Sprinkling in some additional type declarations, perhaps mainly for lists, appears to have made quicksort get closer to timsort and further from funnelsort. Tue Jun 29 14:05:12 PDT 2010 funnelsort and quicksort were about neck and neck.