Why Use Quick Sort?

Pros:

Very fast: At least it is in the average case
In-Place: Saves on memory, doesn't need to do a lot of copying and allocating

Cons:

Typically unstable: changes the relative order of elements with equal keys
Recursive: can incur a performance penalty in some implementations
Pivot sensitivity: if the pivot is poorly chosen, it can lead to poor performance

All this said, quicksort is widely used in the real world because the trade-offs are often worth it. For example, it's a default in PostgreSQL, a popular open-source database.

I'd also like to shoutout Timsort, a hybrid of merge sort and insertion sort that was Python’s default from version 2.3 to 3.10. As of Python 3.11, it’s been replaced by Powersort, which makes small but meaningful improvements.