Prime number calculation fun

Question

We\'re having a bit of fun here at work. It all started with one of the guys setting up a Hackintosh and we were wondering whether it was faster than a Windows Box of (nearl

Answer 1

Here's my solution... its fairly fast... it calculates the primes between 1 and 10,000,000 in 3 seconds on my machine (core i7 @ 2.93Ghz) on Vista64.

My solution is in C, but I am not a professional C programmer. Feel free to criticize the algorithm and the code itself :)

#include
#include
#include
#include

//5MB... allocate a lot of memory at once each time we need it
#define ARRAYMULT 5242880 


//list of calculated primes
__int64* primes; 
//number of primes calculated
__int64 primeCount;
//the current size of the array
__int64 arraySize;

//Prints all of the calculated primes
void PrintPrimes()
{
    __int64 i;
    for(i=0; i than the square of the
                //candidate, the candidate is a prime... so we can add it to the list
                if(primes[j] > square)
                {
                    //our array has run out of room, so we need to expand it
                    if(primeCount >= arraySize)
                    {
                        int k;
                        __int64* newArray = (__int64*)malloc(sizeof(__int64) * (ARRAYMULT + arraySize));

                        for(k=0; k