thrust::stable_sort_by_key

Defined in thrust/sort.h

template<typename DerivedPolicy, typename RandomAccessIterator1, typename RandomAccessIterator2, typename StrictWeakOrdering> void thrust::stable_sort_by_key(const thrust::detail::execution_policy_base<DerivedPolicy> &exec, RandomAccessIterator1 keys_first, RandomAccessIterator1 keys_last, RandomAccessIterator2 values_first, StrictWeakOrdering comp)

stable_sort_by_key performs a key-value sort. That is, stable_sort_by_key sorts the elements in [keys_first, keys_last) and [values_first, values_first + (keys_last - keys_first)) into ascending key order, meaning that if i and j are any two valid iterators in [keys_first, keys_last) such that i precedes j, and p and q are iterators in [values_first, values_first + (keys_last - keys_first)) corresponding to i and j respectively, then *j is not less than *i.

As the name suggests, stable_sort_by_key is stable: it preserves the relative ordering of equivalent elements. That is, if x and y are elements in [keys_first, keys_last) such that x precedes y, and if the two elements are equivalent (neither x < y nor y < x) then a postcondition of stable_sort_by_key is that x still precedes y.

This version of stable_sort_by_key compares key objects using the function object comp.

The algorithm’s execution is parallelized as determined by exec.

The following code snippet demonstrates how to use sort_by_key to sort an array of character values using integers as sorting keys using the thrust::host execution policy for parallelization. The keys are sorted in descending order using the greater<int> comparison operator.

#include <thrust/sort.h>
#include <thrust/execution_policy.h>
...
const int N = 6;
int    keys[N] = {  1,   4,   2,   8,   5,   7};
char values[N] = {'a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f'};
thrust::stable_sort_by_key(thrust::host, keys, keys + N, values, thrust::greater<int>());
// keys is now   {  8,   7,   5,   4,   2,   1}
// values is now {'d', 'f', 'e', 'b', 'c', 'a'}