American flag sort

An American flag sort is an efficient, in-place variant of radix sort that distributes items into hundreds of buckets. Non-comparative sorting algorithms such as radix sort and American flag sort are typically used to sort large objects such as strings, for which comparison is not a unit-time operation. American flag sort iterates through the bits of the objects, considering several bits of each object at a time. For each set of bits, American flag sort makes two passes through the array of objects: first to count the number of objects that will fall in each bin, and second to place each object in its bucket. This works especially well when sorting a byte at a time, using 256 buckets. With some optimizations, it is twice as fast as quicksort for large sets of strings.