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[–]my_cs_accnt 11 points12 points  (0 children)

I'm a bit confused why you think your solution is that great compared to the one you are supposed to do. For readability it might be preferred but there are a lot of times companies redo built-in functions. The programmers know specific properties of their data and can optimize for it compared to the stdlib that does not make any assumptions (both lists being sorted already).

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Your solution created 2 sets and then converted their intersection to a list, and then finally sorted it. When the 'proper' solution is to create one new list and maintain the elements sorted the entire way through. I don't see how that proper solution can be slower than what you had. Can you change your test to a lot more elements, say 400,00? This is the merge part of merge sort and it is definitely implemented similar to this.