It is about running the same source on different archs and measuring elapsed time, imho, not about the result
Yes, my idea was to run exactly the same C code and with as similar as possible quality of compiler (e.g. gcc -O1) on a wide range of machines. It's not too easy to make something that takes long enough to measure it on a fast machine but can fit on to a very small machine, AND that can't be optimized to nothing by stupid compiler tricks.
Translating the same algorithm to a similar language with compiler or JIT can be interesting too. I've actually have a Java version at
http://hoult.org/primes.java for some time, but not publicized it.
I made things a little bit harder for this by using goto in the C code. They are quite structured so it translates easily to a language with labelled break & continue.
Using a very different language such as Forth is maybe interesting to compare different languages on the same machine. Using a completely different algorithm is .. well, that's another comparison again. Fun to play with sure.
My primes algorithm is probably not the best one in the world :-) Actually, I wrote essentially the same algorithm in FORTRAN IV in 1980 when I was a 17 year old high school student, entered it on punched cards, and ran it on the Burroughs B1700 in a computer bureau in Whangarei one night. In that program I printed all the primes less than 1,000,000. I remember that I used a 3-way "computed goto" :-) So I have a little bit of an attachment to this algorithm. In fact that FORTRAN program was a bit more sophisticated as it started with trial=5 and then incremented it alternately by 2 or 4 (5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 25 ...) so not even testing multiples of 2 or 3.
It was interesting when "sieve" became a commonly used benchmark on microcomputers a few years later it used a completely different implementation, with a bitmap of all the numbers in the range of interest (which would need 7.5 MB of memory to find the same primes as the program we are using here!) and as each prime is found clearing the bits for all multiples of that prime.
Both algorithms can I think be justifiably called "Sieve of Eratosthenes". The bitmap one is perhaps closer to what Eratosthenes actually did. Looking now, I see that Wikipedia lists my version as "Incremental sieve"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_of_Eratosthenes#Incremental_sieve. Of course Wikipedia wasn't available to me in hick-town NZ in 1980 so I was forced to come up with the algorithm (including the point Wikipedia notes of starting at the square of each new prime) by myself.
Ha!! Wikipedia's reference for "Incremental Sieve", a 2008 paper, calls my version "The Genuine Sieve of Eratosthenes" and the bitmap one "unfaithful sieve"!
https://www.cs.hmc.edu/~oneill/papers/Sieve-JFP.pdfBut anyway, this is all just in fun, so any way people want to take the time to play around with something a bit different is fine by me, and interesting :-)