I thought it was widely known, IIRC a number of languages have adopted it as the stdlib default sorting algorithm for either unstable/stable sort (can't remember which is it?)
I'm not big into algorithms but I believe that pdqsort and timsort were supposed to be the best two general sorts.
* <p>The implementation was adapted from Tim Peters's list sort for Python
* (<a href="http://svn.python.org/projects/python/trunk/Objects/listsort.txt">
* TimSort</a>). It uses techniques from Peter McIlroy's "Optimistic
* Sorting and Information Theoretic Complexity", in Proceedings of the
* Fourth Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, pp 467-474,
* January 1993.
I'm not big into algorithms but I believe that pdqsort and timsort were supposed to be the best two general sorts.