Comment by badmintonbaseba
12 hours ago
It's partly by the type system. You can implement a std::sort (or slice::sort()) that just delegates to qsort or a qsort-like implementation and have roughly the same compile time performance as just using qsort straight.
But not having to is a win, as the monomorphised sorts are just much faster at runtime than having to do an indirect call for each comparison.
This is a pattern a crate author can rely on (write a function that uses genetics that immediately delegates to a function that uses trait objects or converts to the needed types eagerly so the common logic gets compiled only once), and there have been multiple efforts to have the compiler do that automatically. It has been called polymorphization and it comes up every now and then: https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/add-back-polymorphization/...