14 CS fundamental questions to prepare for your next interview & not sound like a vibe-coder!

This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Shreyas Taware

Optimizing Program Performance

1. Is a switch statement always more efficient than a sequence of if-else statements?

2. How much overhead is incurred by a function call?

3. Is a while loop more efficient than a for loop?

4. Are pointer references more efficient than array indexes?

5. Why does our loop run so much faster if we sum into a local variable instead of an argument that is passed by reference?

6. How can a function run faster when we simply rearrange the parentheses in an arithmetic expression?

Understanding link-time errors

1. What does it mean when the linker reports that it cannot resolve a reference?

2. What is the difference between a static variable and a global variable?

3. What happens if you define two global variables in different C files with the same name?

4. What is the difference between a static library and a dynamic library?

5. Why does it matter what order we list libraries on the command line?

6. And scariest of all, why do some linker-related errors not appear until run time?

Avoiding security holes

1. What are buffer overflow vulnerabilities?

2. What is the program stack?

This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Shreyas Taware