Explain Out-of-Bounds Bugs and Infinite Loops
Company: Arista
Role: Software Engineer
Category: Software Engineering Fundamentals
Difficulty: easy
Interview Round: Technical Screen
You are given a C or C++ code snippet that behaves incorrectly. The root cause is an out-of-bounds memory access, such as reading or writing past the end of an array or buffer.
1. Identify the bug and explain why it is unsafe.
2. A common symptom of invalid memory access is a segmentation fault. Explain why this program might instead keep running and appear as an infinite loop.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates understanding of out-of-bounds memory access, undefined behavior in C/C++, and how invalid reads or writes can affect program control flow, including crashes or apparent infinite loops.