Closed antonmedv closed 6 years ago
Hi,
Can you tell more about it? When and why you decided to create it? How long it took? What background you have?
My parents bought me a PC around 1997 when I was 14 years old, the PC was very expensive back then and was not very useful for anything except gaming. So I bought the book "C++ for Kids" in order to do something useful with the PC, my goal was to program a graphical computer game myself and I had heard you could do this using C++ :-)
As a programming exercise this book contained a graphical program for checking whether a number was a prime or not. I had a lot of fun with this program, but because it was very slow (it took about 1 minute to check whether a random 32-bit number was a prime or not) I tried to optimize it to make it run faster. That's how I got hooked to prime numbers.
I got my first programming job in 2007 in the finance sector just before the financial crisis started, during the financial crisis my company suffered a lot and finally went bankrupt in 2010. So I lost my job and I finally had plenty of time to start a side project. Back then I decided to start primesieve
and basically use my knowledge about primes which I had acquired when I was a teenager to write a multi-threaded sieve of Eratosthenes implementation (there was no multi-threaded sieve of Eratosthenes implementation on the web back then) and to make a graphical user interface for it as well.
Initially I thought this would take me 2 months of work. But it took actually much longer, you can spend endless time to polish your side projects e.g. improve the website, improve the GitHub README.md
, improve the build system experience, improve testing (looking at your side projects I guess you know this very well). I mostly finished primesieve
in 2016. Nowadays I just do maintainance work e.g. silence compiler warnings, fix issues, merge useful pull requests, ...
I did go to university and study computer science but most of my knowledge about programming, CPU architecture and primes is actually self taught. I own a large collection of books about optimizing C/C++ and a large collection of books on how CPUs work. I also read a lot of scientific papers related to prime sieving and I spent a considerable amount of time reading other people's open source code.
Greetings, Kim
Thanks for response. This is very interesting. Hope some day you invent your own sieve 😃
Hi,
I really like you project! Really AWESOME! Can you tell more about it? When and why you decided to create it? How long it took? What background you have?