Interview questions on C++ for developers with mainly Java/.NET experience

Question

What questions would ask a candidate with mainly Java/.NET experience (10 years+) in an interview for a C++ position?

Answer 1

First, make sure that they can think algorithmically, regardless of programming language. Then, make them solve some simple problem in C++ code on the whiteboard. Then, ask about the distinguishing features of C++ that you actually use in your project. Possible topics are memory management, RAII, templates, references, operator overloading. Maybe boost and metaprogramming, if you use it. OO-style programming is similar in C++ and Java/.NET (class-based, single-dispatch), except that it also supports multiple inheritance and virtual inheritance. Understanding what constitutes implementation-defined, unspecified and undefined behavior is also a plus.

Answer 2

The main issue that I have seen with programmers from .Net and Java that use C++ is memory management. They have a big tendency to always allocate objects on the heap instead of using stack, so watch for this.

Answer 3

Any developer starting a new job needs to learn the idioms used in that project and team. Learning the idioms of the particular implementation language is just an aspect of that, really - an extra learning curve issue, but for C++ relative to C# or Java, probably not that big a deal. The exception may be where there are strong religious views that the person may not be willing to drop as a point of principle.

The non-garbage-collected nature of C++ is an obvious area for religious issues. I might worry about someone who strongly asserts that all non-GC software is buggy without acknowledging that that using GC can lead to different resource-management complications and bugs rather than complete upside-only elimination of a whole class of problems. A true extremist in that position may reject C++ resource management idioms pretty much out of hand, insisting that the resulting issues are inevitable anyway and that any working C++ code produced by others is a result of bizarre superhuman intelligence or fluke. A view that GC is generally a better approach wouldn't necessarily worry me, so long as there is flexibility and a willingness to adopt idioms appropriate to C++.

A question to reveal that viewpoint? Without giving a misleading impression of people who currently have mostly GC-specific experience, but would quickly adapt? I doubt I can come up with one, and I think the real issue would be with people who's bias is apparent throughout, and irrespective of the particular question, anyway. That's assuming you can reliably detect the issue in an interview situation at all, assuming the applicant knows the role involves C++.

Answer 4

Proper use of pointers and references:

• Pointers are variables that hold an address to a block of memory that is equal in size to the type of the pointer.

  int * test = new int(5);    // on 32-bit OSs, test would be 4 bytes
  *test      = 6;             // access the value (dereferencing)
  delete test;                // free the memory
  

• References are pointers that cannot be modified - instead, any operations performed on them affect the memory pointed to.

  int target = 1;             // target now holds a value of 1
  int& ref   = target;        // ref points to target
  ref        = 2;             // modifications to ref modify target
                              // notice that we do not dereference ref