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Roman
Roman

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Reversing sort order in Rust

Rust allows sort items by key easily with .sort_by_key, here is example, it will put important notes to the end:

#[derive(Debug)]
struct Note {
    important: bool,
    title: &'static str,
}
let mut notes = vec![
    Note { important: false, title: "ddd"},
    Note { important: true, title: "aaa"},
    Note { important: false, title: "ccc"},
];
notes.sort_by_key(|k| k.important);
println!("{:?}", notes);
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But reversing order of sorting with key may be not so obvious, it is achieved with Reverse helper struct, here is how it can be applied to above example, in order to put important notes first:

use std::cmp::Reverse;
// ...
notes.sort_by_key(|k| Reverse(k.important));
println!("{:?}", notes);
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How is it implemented? Let's look at the source code of Rust standard library:

pub struct Reverse<T>(pub T);

impl<T: Ord> Ord for Reverse<T> {
    fn cmp(&self, other: &Reverse<T>) -> Ordering {
        other.0.cmp(&self.0)
    }
}
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The implementation is straightforward, it is newtype wrapper for original type, and for types with Ord trait it reimplements Ord but instead of comparing self with other it comparing other with self meaning it will reverse order in the result. Simple and beautiful!

And it will play nicely with complex keys too, lets put important notes first, and sort by title ascending for same importance groups:

notes.sort_by_key(|k| (Reverse(k.important), k.title));
println!("{:?}", notes);
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Of course in some cases it is possible to just negate value, like in this example using !k.important will produce same results, but negating is not always possible (eg. strings). Regarding performance I've benchmarked both methods and have not found any difference, both methods require same time if ordering booleans.

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