99.5% would still be e^200 numbers checked (7x10^86). According to the Quora link in my other comment, we've only calculated primes in sequence up to 4x10^18 as of 7 years ago. 95% is very doable though.
Edited to correct first N primes vs primes up to N.
One thing to remember is that arrays are just pointers under the hood. Even if you don't use them directly, or are always using smart pointers like
std::shared_ptr<T>, they're still there.For example, accessing the following array:
int foo[3] = {1, 2, 3}; // foo is identical to int*, except the type contains a size foo[1] == 2; *(foo + 1) == 2;Realistically in modern C++ you could likely avoid raw pointers entirely. C++ references cover a ton of the pointer use cases. I'd say the main goal is to prevent data from being copied around needlessly, since that takes more time and memory bandwidth.