primes

A submission for the Software Drag Race

• primes_faithful_st_.ml is around 8-10x faster than the current submission.
• primes_faithful_mt.ml is around 30-50% faster than its single-threaded counterpart with nproc=4
• primes_faithful_mc.ml uses the Multicore OCaml compiler, the perf differences between it and conventional threaded OCaml code are marginal*
• primes_faithful_fk.ml uses fork() and pipe(), hitting upwards of 2x speedup for nproc=4 compared to single-threaded. Amazing what the classics can achieve.

* NOTE that, when I compare the single-threaded Trunk OCaml compiled binaries with the Multicore OCaml ones. The performance then appears marginal. However, when comparing single-threaded Multicore-compiled binaries with parallel Multicore-compiled ones, I do get that relative 2x speedup as well. Unfortunately this exercise aims to hit the highest raw performance out of all OCaml compilers, not compare running times within the context of the Multicore compiler only.