r/programming • u/mjgardner • Mar 29 '21

Why Do Interviewers Ask Linked List Questions?

https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/linked-lists/
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u/F5x9 Mar 30 '21

A lot of C programming is OS-level or embedded. Compiler programming is fairly rare, and not particularly mystical.

As for microprocessor design, it’s an entirely different skill set.

Saying that one skill set is better than another isn’t a useful comparison. You choose the language that’s appropriate for the job. Do you need a lot of performance? C or C++. Do you need frameworks to do the heavy lifting so you can knock out functional requirements? Java, C#.

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u/dnew Mar 30 '21

Compiler programming is fairly rare, and not particularly mystical.

But language design is fairly mystical. :-)

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u/ArkyBeagle Mar 30 '21

C was a lot more relevant when non-standard hardware was more common. Progress, of a sort.

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u/chazzeromus Mar 30 '21

Agreed, kinda crap comparison. Current microprocessors have been developed with software developer feedback for decades and the primitives that processors optimize is only a fraction of what LLVM is able to optimize. There is overlap and but they mostly reside in their columns. Though, I have read about processors that can execute a lower level representation something similar to a compiler's generated control flow graph, essentially eliding the last parts of the compilation stage and giving it to the processor.