Whoa, hey Tim! Very much agree on no "best" sorting algorithm. The generic-comparison case is one I keep idly considering, although more focused on long lists than short ones. There's been a lot of improvement lately in sorting small datatypes (arguably kicked off by fluxsort), but really, who has so many 4-byte ints laying around that sorting them is a bottleneck? A point Orson Peters made when presenting glidesort[0] was that lists with many repeated duplicates are common even in generic data, as in ordering customers by city, and quicksort seems to be the best way to deal with such a list. However glidesort/driftsort is still largely oriented towards smaller types, and its mergesort-quicksort hybridization can pretty easily make bad choices, as I described at [1] and especially [2] (slightly surprised I didn't mention binary insertion sort in that first section). So this approach feels like it's still immature to me.
[0] https://archive.fosdem.org/2023/schedule/event/rust_glidesor...
[1] https://mlochbaum.github.io/BQN/implementation/primitive/sor...
[2] https://mlochbaum.github.io/BQN/implementation/primitive/sor...