Inaki Ucar explains some of the nuance behind sorting in R:
The latest R tip in Win-Vector Blog encourages you to Use Radix Sort based on a simple benchmark showing a x35 speedup compared to the default method, but with no further explanation. In my opinion, though, the complete tip would be, instead, use radix sort… if you know what you are doing, because a quick benchmark shouldn’t spare you the effort of actually reading the docs. And here is a spoiler: you are already using it.
One may wonder why R’s default sorting algorithm is so bad, and why was even chosen. The thing is that there is a trick here, and to understand it, first we must understand the benchmark’s data and then read the docs.
Read the whole thing.