Question

After 10 minutes of work I have written a function presented below. It returns a list of all primes lower than an argument. I have used all known for me programing and mathematical tricks in order to make this function as fast as possible. To find all the primes lower than a million it takes about 2 seconds.

Do you see any possibilities to optimize it even further? Any ideas?

def Primes(To):
  if To<2:
    return []
  if To<3:
    return [2]
  Found=[2]
  n=3
  LastSqr=0
  while n<=To:
     k=0
     Limit=len(Found)
     IsPrime=True
     while k<Limit:
         if k>=LastSqr: 
            if Found[k]>pow(n,0.5): 
               LastSqr=k
               break
         if n%Found[k]==0:
            IsPrime=False
            break
         k+=1
     if IsPrime:
        Found.append(n)
     n+=1
  return Found

Answer 1

You can use a couple tricks to speed things up, using the basic sieve of erastothenes. One is to use Wheel Factorization to skip calculating numbers that are known not to be prime. For example, besides 2 and 3, all primes are congruent to 1 or 5 mod 6. This means you don’t have to process 4 of every 6 numbers at all.

At the next level, all primes are congruent to 1, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, or 29, mod 30. You can throw out 22 of every 30 numbers.

Here is a simple implementation of the sieve of Erastothenes that doesn’t calculate or store even numbers:

def basic_gen_primes(n):
    """Return a list of all primes less then or equal to n"""
    if n < 2:
        return []

    # The sieve.  Each entry i represents (2i + 1)
    size = (n + 1) // 2
    sieve = [True] * size

    # 2(0) + 1 == 1 is not prime
    sieve[0] = False

    for i, value in enumerate(sieve):
        if not value:
            continue

        p = 2*i + 1

        # p is prime.  Remove all of its multiples from the sieve
        # p^2 == (2i + 1)(2i + 1) == (4i^2 + 4i + 1) == 2(2i^2 + 2i) + 1
        multiple = 2 * i * i + 2 * i 
        if multiple >= size:
            break

        while multiple < size:
            sieve[multiple] = False
            multiple += p 

    return [2] + [2*i+1 for i, value in enumerate(sieve) if value]

As mentioned, you can use more exotic sieves as well.