Implement concurrent structures and debug queue code
Company: Microsoft
Role: Software Engineer
Category: Coding & Algorithms
Difficulty: hard
Interview Round: Technical Screen
The coding rounds covered several implementation and debugging tasks:
1. Implement an LRU cache that supports `get(key)` and `put(key, value)` in constant time. Then explain how you would make the cache safe under concurrent access from multiple threads.
2. Implement a hash map from scratch with `put`, `get`, and `remove`. Then discuss or extend the design so that it works correctly when multiple threads read and write concurrently.
3. Implement a quadtree for two-dimensional points or rectangles, and support spatial query operations such as returning all items inside a query rectangle.
4. Review and debug a C++20 producer-consumer program built around a message queue. Identify correctness issues, race conditions, synchronization mistakes, and any performance or API-design problems.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates data-structure implementation and concurrent programming competencies by testing construction of an LRU cache, a custom hash map, a quadtree spatial index, and debugging of a producer-consumer queue.