Discussion on "Sorting in JavaScript"

Rupert McKay · 2022-01-17T08:16:09.124Z

JavaScript arrays have a builtin sort method, which mostly does what you expect: [1, 4, 2, 3].sort(); // [1, 2, 3, 4] ["d", "a", "b", "c"].sort(); // ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd'] But it has some quirks. For examples numbers are sorting as though they were s...

Wow, I really love your writing! Glad you shared those edgy cases, I hope it stays in my mind. Awesome article.

Thank you, Marcelo!

It's comments like these that make me excited to keep writing articles in the future.

Great article, but you skipped over what I believe is the biggest quirk of Array.prototype.sort(): sorting is applied in-place on the array, ie it mutates the array! This is not immediately apparent if you were to do something like const sortedArray = unsortedArray.sort(), that you just changed the unsortedArray too. I have worked on several teams who have been burned by hard-to-find bugs caused by this behaviour, which is not easily caught by a linter. I'd advise you mention this in your article too.

That's a great point! I'll update the article to make that clear.

EDIT: I have made an update now and called out the in-place sorting in a few parts of the post.

Thanks again for pointing this out!

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Sorting in JavaScript

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