Q: buffer overflow?
%%A: avoid arrays, use vector
Q: XOR usage?
AA: usages? easy to google
Q: why bitwise shift?
%%A: mostly an optimization as far as I know, but the compiler probably translates integer multiply/divide already.
AA: usages? easy to google
what's wrong with pointers?
dangling pointer?
Q3: what are the common exceptions in c++?
%%A: c++ has a few standard exceptions and a lot of UB; java has lots of standard exceptions and no UB.
Q3b: undefined behavior?
%%A: much worse than exceptions or error codes
%%A: perhaps fairly consistent on one platform, but I know writing beyond an array's limit is indeterminate. See [[c++ debugging)]
Q: exceptions – why do you not want to use it in your API?
%%A: can of worm. If I throw I can't control how clients use this API. What if it's thrown in a dtor? What if they don't catch by reference? What if they catch a sliced one or a copy rather than the original exception object I want them to get? What if they catch by pointer and try to delete or forget to delete? Java cleaned it up.
%%A: I don't see a lot of well-regarded API's exposing exceptions
%%A: there's performance cost
A: now I think we should be consistent throughout – either throw exceptions consistently or never.
Q: memory leak – what is it and how do you deal with it?
%%A: valgrind replaces malloc with ...?
%%A: provide class-specific op-new (and delete), which is safer (see effC++) than a customized global op-new. Add your own house keeping code therein...
Q: how is semaphore different from a mutex
%%A: I think a mutex is more basic and usually provided by the kernel (For a userland thread the thread library not the kernel must provide the mutex). I guess the counting semaphore is implemented using mutex + condition variables, since the semephore may need to inform the waiting threads.
Q: preprocessors?
%%A: 3 usages in my projects – includes, macros and conditional compile. Now I think template meta programming also uses a lot of macros.
Q: stack trace?
%%A: very useful, that's why java, c#, python, perl provide it, and GDB too.
A: [[safe c++]] shows simple and robust technique to build a stack trace upon assertion failure
I said many times "I'm philosophical about that" – meaning "it's controversial IMO and I have my views which may look naive or extreme or eccentric"
