GTKClist Sorting

Hello, I am currently writing a gtk program that has a GtkCList. This list contains Dates and numbers so the built in sorting was not working correctly. I found the bubblesort algorithm on the help pages, but that turned out to be really slow (as expected). After that I wrote a quicksort algorithm which allowed me to sort a bit quicker then the bubble sort. The problem is that I am trying to sort thousands, or maybe even a million records. Has anyone found a way to do this more quickly? Is there any way that I could compile a library to do that? If so are there any tutorials or anything that could help me? On a side note, when I sort the records using the built in functionallity (non natural sorting) it works quickly... Thanks for any help! Neil