Generate a list of primes up to a certain number

That sieve posted by George Dontas is a good starting point. Here’s a much faster version with running times for 1e6 primes of 0.095s as opposed to 30s for the original version.

sieve <- function(n)
{
   n <- as.integer(n)
   if(n > 1e8) stop("n too large")
   primes <- rep(TRUE, n)
   primes[1] <- FALSE
   last.prime <- 2L
   fsqr <- floor(sqrt(n))
   while (last.prime <= fsqr)
   {
      primes[seq.int(2L*last.prime, n, last.prime)] <- FALSE
      sel <- which(primes[(last.prime+1):(fsqr+1)])
      if(any(sel)){
        last.prime <- last.prime + min(sel)
      }else last.prime <- fsqr+1
   }
   which(primes)
}

Here are some alternate algorithms below coded about as fast as possible in R. They are slower than the sieve but a heck of a lot faster than the questioners original post.

Here’s a recursive function that uses mod but is vectorized. It returns for 1e5 almost instantaneously and 1e6 in under 2s.

primes <- function(n){
    primesR <- function(p, i = 1){
        f <- p %% p[i] == 0 & p != p[i]
        if (any(f)){
            p <- primesR(p[!f], i+1)
        }
        p
    }
    primesR(2:n)
}

The next one isn’t recursive and faster again. The code below does primes up to 1e6 in about 1.5s on my machine.

primest <- function(n){
    p <- 2:n
    i <- 1
    while (p[i] <= sqrt(n)) {
        p <-  p[p %% p[i] != 0 | p==p[i]]
        i <- i+1
    }
    p
}

BTW, the spuRs package has a number of prime finding functions including a sieve of E. Haven’t checked to see what the speed is like for them.

And while I’m writing a very long answer… here’s how you’d check in R if one value is prime.

isPrime <- function(x){
    div <- 2:ceiling(sqrt(x))
    !any(x %% div == 0)
}