Design an object-oriented queue and compare implementations
Company: Optiver
Role: Software Engineer
Category: Software Engineering Fundamentals
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Technical Screen
You are asked to design an object-oriented **Queue** abstraction and discuss how it can be implemented internally in different ways.
Describe:
1. **Queue interface**
- Define a clean, language-agnostic interface (or abstract class) for a generic FIFO queue.
- Include the core operations and their expected behavior (e.g., `enqueue`, `dequeue`, `peek`, `isEmpty`, `size`, and possibly capacity-related methods).
2. **Internal implementations**
For the same Queue interface, describe at least **two or three different internal data-structure implementations**, such as:
- Linked-list-based queue
- Array-based queue (including circular array/buffer)
- Queue implemented using two stacks
3. **Trade-offs analysis**
For each implementation, analyze and compare:
- Time complexity of core operations (`enqueue`, `dequeue`, `peek`)
- Space usage and overhead
- Memory behavior (e.g., cache friendliness, allocations)
- Practical pros/cons and when you would choose each approach
Optionally, also discuss how you might extend the design for:
- A **bounded** vs **unbounded** queue
- **Thread-safe** vs **non-thread-safe** versions
- How you would expose these variants via interfaces/classes (e.g., using different implementations behind the same Queue interface).
Quick Answer: This question evaluates object-oriented design, API abstraction, and core data-structures competency by requiring a generic FIFO Queue interface and comparison of internal implementations, testing abstraction, modularity, and performance reasoning within Software Engineering Fundamentals.