Applied Materials Staff Engineer Interview Questions and Answers

References and pointers are both used to refer to memory locations, but references cannot be null and cannot be reseated.

• Pointers can be null or uninitialized

• Pointers can be reseated to point to a different memory location

• References are automatically dereferenced

• References cannot be used with arrays

• Pointers can be used with arrays

References are necessary when passing large objects to functions or when returning objects from functions.

• When passing large objects to functions

• When returning objects from functions

• When working with complex data structures

• When implementing operator overloading

• When working with polymorphism

Const pointers should be declared in the same scope as the variable they point to.

• Declaring const pointers in the same scope as the variable they point to ensures that the pointer cannot be used to modify the variable.

• If the pointer is only used within a function, it should be declared within that function.

• If the pointer is used across multiple functions, it should be declared in a header file or at the top of the sour...read more

Copy constructor with pointers creates a new object by copying the values of the existing object's pointers.

• Copy constructor is used to create a new object from an existing object.

• Pointers in the new object point to the same memory locations as the original object.

• Deep copy should be used to avoid shallow copy issues.

new and malloc are used for dynamic memory allocation in C++ and C respectively.

• new is an operator in C++ while malloc is a function in C.

• new automatically calls the constructor while malloc does not.

• new returns a pointer to the object while malloc returns a void pointer.

• new throws an exception if allocation fails while malloc returns NULL.

• new can be overloaded while malloc cannot be.

• new and delete are used together wh

Use bitwise operations to find the sum of two numbers without using mathematical operators.

• Use bitwise XOR to find the sum of two numbers without carrying.

• Use bitwise AND and left shift to find the carry.

• Repeat the process until there is no carry left.

To delete a node from a linked list when only given a reference to the node, we can copy the data of the next node to the given node and delete the next node.

• Copy the data of the next node to the given node

• Update the next pointer of the given node to skip the next node

• Delete the next node

UDP is preferred over TCP in this project due to its low latency and lightweight nature.

• UDP is a connectionless protocol, which means it does not establish a direct connection between the sender and receiver.

• UDP is faster than TCP as it does not have the overhead of establishing and maintaining a connection.

• UDP is suitable for applications where real-time data transmission is crucial, such as video streaming or online ...read more

To clear the 7th bit in a 32-bit register, perform a bitwise AND operation with a mask that has all bits set to 1 except the 7th bit.

• Create a mask with the 7th bit set to 0 and all other bits set to 1

• Perform a bitwise AND operation between the register and the mask

• Store the result back in the register