Code Room
CodingHardcod-g373
Subject Suffix structuresLevel Senior–Staff~35 minCommon in Algorithms & data structures interviewsIndustries Software development

Question

Given a string s of lowercase letters (0 <= len(s) <= 10^4), return the number of DISTINCT non-empty substrings of s. Duplicates are counted once. The answer fits in a 64-bit integer.

Implement
count_distinct_substrings(s: str) → int
Examples
in["abc"]out6
What a strong answer looks like

State your approach and its time/space complexity out loud before you optimize. Handle the edge cases (empty input, duplicates, overflow), and say why you chose this over the brute force. Green tests are the floor, not the grade.

Vibe coding: describe the solution in plain language (or narrate it) and the coach grades your approach. Generating runnable code from your description is coming next.

Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.