speed up prime number generating - swift

Question

I have written a program that generates prime numbers . It works well but I want to speed it up as it takes quite a while for generating the all the prime numbers till 10000
var list = [2,3]
var limitation = 10000
var flag = true
var tmp = 0
for (var count = 4 ; count <= limitation ; count += 1 ){
while(flag && tmp <= list.count - 1){
if (count % list[tmp] == 0){
flag = false
}else if ( count % list[tmp] != 0 && tmp != list.count - 1 ){
tmp += 1
}else if ( count % list[tmp] != 0 && tmp == list.count - 1 ){
list.append(count)
}
}
flag = true
tmp = 0
}
print(list)

Answer 1

Two simple improvements that will make it fast up through 100,000 and maybe 1,000,000.
All primes except 2 are odd
Start the loop at 5 and increment by 2 each time. This isn't going to speed it up a lot because you are finding the counter example on the first try, but it's still a very typical improvement.
Only search through the square root of the value you are testing
The square root is the point at which a you half the factor space, i.e. any factor less than the square root is paired with a factor above the square root, so you only have to check above or below it. There are far fewer numbers below the square root, so you should check the only the values less than or equal to the square root.
Take 10,000 for example. The square root is 100. For this you only have to look at values less than the square root, which in terms of primes is roughly 25 values instead of over 1000 checks for all primes less than 10,000.
Doing it even faster
Try another method altogether, like a sieve. These methods are much faster but have a higher memory overhead.

Answer 2

In addition to what Nick already explained, you can also easily take advantage of the following property: all primes greater than 3 are congruent to 1 or -1 mod 6.
Because you've already included 2 and 3 in your initial list, you can therefore start with count = 6, test count - 1 and count + 1 and increment by 6 each time.
Below is my first attempt ever at Swift, so pardon the syntax which is probably far from optimal.
var list = [2,3]
var limitation = 10000
var flag = true
var tmp = 0
var max = 0
for(var count = 6 ; count <= limitation ; count += 6) {
for(var d = -1; d <= 1; d += 2) {
max = Int(floor(sqrt(Double(count + d))))
for(flag = true, tmp = 0; flag && list[tmp] <= max; tmp++) {
if((count + d) % list[tmp] == 0) {
flag = false
}
}
if(flag) {
list.append(count + d)
}
}
}
print(list)
I've tested the above code on iswift.org/playground with limitation = 10,000, 100,000 and 1,000,000.