A. Andersson and S. Nilsson Implementing radixsort.
The ACM Journal of Experimental Algorithmics. Volume 3, Article 7, 1998.

We present and evaluate several optimization and implementation techniques for string sorting. In particular, we study a recently published radix sorting algorithm, Forward radixsort, that has a provably good worst-case behavior. Our experimental results indicate that radix sorting is considerably faster (often more than twice as fast) than comparison-based sorting methods. This is true even for small input sequences. We also show that it is possible to implement radix sorting so as to achieve good worst-case running time without sacrificing average-case performance. Our implementations are competitive with the best previously published string sorting programs.

Full paper (postscript)
Full paper (pdf)
Code (At Stefan Nilsson's home page)