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Implement KV store serialization

OpenAISoftware Engineer · Technical Screen
MediumSoftware EngineerTechnical ScreenCoding & Algorithms

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This question evaluates skills in binary serialization and deserialization, data encoding and layout, type tagging, endianness, checksumming, versioning for forward/backward compatibility, and algorithmic efficiency and space usage for an in-memory key-value store; it falls under the Coding & Algorithms domain.

Implement serialization and deserialization for an in‑memory key‑value store to and from a contiguous bytes buffer. Keys are UTF‑8 strings; values may be int64, float64, bool, UTF‑8 string, or nested maps. Specify and implement a binary format including a magic header and version, per‑entry type tags, length‑prefixing, endianness, checksums, and forward/backward compatibility. Provide encode(store)->bytes and decode(bytes)->store with O(n) time and minimal extra space. Discuss trade‑offs compared to text formats like JSON or MessagePack.