Algorithms – How to Search for a Sub-string in an Array of Strings

If you look at your code for swapping you:

// If current element is lower than pivot
// then swap it with the element at store_index
// and move the store_index to the right.

But, ~50% of the time that string you just swapped needs to be moved back, which is why faster merge sorts work from both ends at the same time.

Next if you check to see if the first and last elements are the same before doing each of the recursive call you avoid wasting time calling a function only to quickly exit it. This happens 10000000 in your final test which does add noticeable amounts of time.

Use,

if (pivot_index -1 > start) quick_sort(lines, start, pivot_index - 1);

if (pivot_index + 1 < end) quick_sort(lines, pivot_index + 1, end);

You still want an outer function to do an initial if (start < end) but that only needs to happen once so that function can just call an unsafe version of your code without that outer comparison.

Also, picking a random pivot tends to avoid N^2 worst case results, but it's probably not a big deal with your random data set.

Finally, the hidden problem is QuickSort is comparing strings in ever smaller buckets that are ever closer together,

(Edit: So, AAAAA, AAAAB, AAAAC, AAAAD then AAAAA, AAAAB. So, strcmp needs to step though a lot of A's before looking the useful parts of the strings.)

but with Merge sort you look at the smallest buckets first while they are vary random. Mergsorts final passes do compare a lot of strings close to each other, but it's less of an issue then. One way to make Quick sorts faster for strings is to compare the first digits of the outer strings and if there the same ignore them when doing the inner comparisons, but you have to be careful that all strings have enough digits that your not skipping past the null terminator.

And sorts the array internally in the ChoosePivot subroutine to calculate the median of median using a comparison based sorting algorithm.

This is the incorrect premise (you are right that if we did do a comparison-based sort, we couldn't be linear). The point of median-of-medians is that it is linear - you don't need to sort the whole set if all you want is the median. See proof of O(n) running time on wikipedia for more detail.