Why java Arrays use two different sort algorithms for different types?

Java 7 uses Dual-Pivot Quicksort for primitives and TimSort for objects.

 

According to the Java 7 API doc for primitives:

 

    Implementation note: The sorting algorithm is a Dual-Pivot Quicksort by Vladimir Yaroslavskiy, Jon Bentley, and Joshua Bloch. This algorithm offers O(n log(n)) performance on many data sets that cause other quicksorts to degrade to quadratic performance, and is typically faster than traditional (one-pivot) Quicksort implementations.

 

According to the Java 7 API doc for objects:

 

    The implementation was adapted from Tim Peters's list sort for Python ( TimSort). It uses techiques from Peter McIlroy's "Optimistic Sorting and Information Theoretic Complexity", in Proceedings of the Fourth Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, pp 467-474, January 1993.

 

The most likely reason: quicksort is not stable, i.e. equal entries can change their relative position during the sort; among other things, this means that if you sort an already sorted array, it may not stay unchanged.

Since primitive types have no identity (there is no way to distinguish two ints with the same value), this does not matter for them. But for reference types, it could cause problems for some applications. Therefore, a stable merge sort is used for those.

OTOH, a reason not to use the (guaranteed n*log(n)) merge sort for primitive types might be that it requires making a clone of the array. For reference types, where the referred objects usually take up far more memory than the array of references, this generally does not matter. But for primitive types, cloning the array outright doubles the memory usage.