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Implement a single-writer, multiple-reader, writes-always-succeed data structure.
You're writing a trading system that requires market data to be written immediately to a buffer. The alternative is to wait for readers to be done before writing. This adds latency to the market data write-thread and increases the risk that the internal network card buffer overflows and starts dropping packets.
Packet drops cannot be tolerated since they are expensive to recover from and delay trading activity. This data structure will be used in your feedhandlers, freeing the market data thread with instantly-completing writes.
At this level of design, requirements are often vague. As a developer, your job is to understand the context that this data structure exists in, and build it while being able to explain the trade-offs of your decisions..
Ultimately, there will be submissions that are more efficient that others, and so you should aim for your submission to achieve a runtime and memory usage that is on the efficient frontier.
Context
- Your data structure will contain small types that are default and copy constructible.
- Given that writes must be instant, your implementation cannot use any threading primitives that would lead to waiting (e.g.
std::mutex,std::condition_variable, etc). - There will only ever be one writer, but there can be multiple readers. A writer can write at the same time that readers read!
- If nothing has yet been written, reads can still succeed, but callers will inspect the return value to understand whether the read was successful.
Test cases
| Test | Description |
|---|---|
write-while-read | Writing is allowed while values are being read. Poorer implementations that are otherwise correct will suffer here. |
read | Read the last written value. |
read-many | Read a series of updates. |
empty-read | You read before anything was written. |
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Three by three
What is the value of grid after running this code?
grid = [[0] * 3] * 3
grid[0][0] = 3Why getcracked?
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