Design First-Fit and Best-Fit Memory Allocation
Company: OpenAI
Role: Software Engineer
Category: Software Engineering Fundamentals
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Technical Screen
Overview: Design a contiguous-region heap allocator that supports two placement policies, block splitting, freeing, and adjacent-block coalescing. Explain metadata consistency, exact-fit and exhaustion cases, duplicate or invalid frees, fragmentation, alignment, concurrency, and tests that expose corruption.
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