#memory management

6 memory management interview questions, asked at Nvidia, Microsoft, OpenAI and 1 more company. Last asked Oct 2026.

Per-user chat event counts in a sliding windowCodingA chat service runs for months without restarting. It sends you a stream of message events. Each event has a userid, a chatid and an integer timestamp in seconds. You must answer…
Last asked Oct 2026
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Memory allocator with malloc, free and coalescingCodingManage one arena of size bytes, addressed by offset from 0. You hand out and take back ranges of it, like malloc and free in C. Nothing is stored in the arena itself; track it in…
Last asked Oct 2026
Thread-safe reference-counted smart pointer in C++CodingImplement a reference-counted smart pointer class template in C++ from scratch, in the spirit of std::sharedptr. Several owners can share one object; it is destroyed exactly once…
Last asked Sep 2026
Memory management in Python and JavaCodingExplain how Python and Java manage memory: reference counting and the cycle collector versus tracing garbage collection, generations, the stack and the heap, and what leaks still…
Last asked Feb 2026
Polynomial multiplication API in CCodingDesign and implement a small C API for polynomials: a representation, creation and freeing, and a function that multiplies two polynomials and returns a new one. Pay attention to…
Last asked Feb 2026
Optimize a small-string class in C++CodingBuild a high-performance C++ string class for a workload with very many strings, supporting operations such as compare, concatenate and substring. Short strings live in a…
Last asked Dec 2025