Not yet. But I have no doubt in my mind that a once we have smarter then human AI there will be compilers that absolutely can turn bubblesort into quicksort.
Seems fairly unlikely. The best sorting algorithm is a function of the data. The compiler can't know this. There are pathological data sets where quicksort is O(n^2). For small n, quick sort is also a bad choice.
The programmer can understand these domain characteristics but the compiler certainly can't. If code isn't running qsort(), this could be a mistake, but may also be an optimization.
You almost always know something about the data that a sorting function will operate on. Unless of course you are implementing a generic sorting algorithm. In practice you could train your compiler on real world data to allow it to optimize better for your environment. This is already happening with profile guided optimizations.
I think it's unfair that people downvoted this to gray. This person didn't claim that this was about to happen, and it seems likely to me that when/if AI surpasses human intelligence that something like this would be possible. It might require some additional way to describe expectations about the input data, and it might be many years away, but I would be disappointed if compilers couldn't do this in the far distant future. Look at the progress we've made in the last seventy years and try to extrapolate that out a thousand years forward. I obviously can't guarantee what will happen, but is it really that unreasonable to suggest progress like this as a strong possibility?
