Lesley Lai's Blog

This piece is a submission for IndieWeb Carnival May 2026: Write a love letter.

OOP-bashing seems fashionable nowadays.

Edit 2026-03-12: I just learned about some nasty security gotcha of Docker, so I changed the docker-compose snippet in this post.

I’ve done a complete rewrite of this site.

Exploring the representation of abstract syntax trees in C++ has been a long-standing fascination of mine.

My journey of learning from online courses started in 2013, and over the years I took a lot of them, abandoning even more along the way.

Today, I’m tackling a piece of code involving several mappings.

TL;DR: I was forced to leave university without completing my degree due to unfortunate circumstances, and returning has proven unexpectedly challenging.

First, for some context: I wrote this blog post more than a year ago but have yet to make it public since my mental health greatly degraded while I was still editing it.

Today is the nth time I got bitten by CMAKE_SOURCE_DIR, so I will write it here.

Announced two months ago, the dynamic rendering Vulkan extension promises to get rid of the VkRenderPass and VkFramebuffer objects, which were parts of Vulkan that I “don’t understand and don’t really care about.”

Update 2025: I’ve since migrated this blog to Astro, but the implementation strategy of the translation remains largely unchanged.

I recently learned about std::align, one of the lesser-known functions in the C++ standard library due to its limited use cases.

This year is my first year doing the Advent of Code challenge, and today (2021 Day 7)‘s challenge is a fun one.

Since the advent of C++14, we can create lambda expressions that take auto parameters.

I am doing some peer programming for a university course project today.

Yesterday, someone in the #include<C++> discord server asked the following question: how std::function works with lambda captures and functions handling I still don’t understand Below was my answer to the question, with some typo-fixes and expansions: Inv…

I already received some great feedback for this post, and any further feedbacks, error-correction, and resource recommendation are welcome.

Today I stumble upon an article These Modern Programming Languages Will Make You Suffer after Twitter outrage.

Update 2025: Rust now uses lld as the default linker on x86-64 Linux in nightly.

Recursive module is an interesting feature in OCaml.

Recently, I have seen some people passing complex mutable lambdas to standard algorithms.

In the conventional wisdom of the C++ community, non-static const or reference data variables are considered problematic.

It is easy to make mistakes when conducting mathematical proofs.

What are the statics of a programming language?

Would spamming the noexcept keyword make your code faster?

From a layperson’s perspective, the field of programming language research is full of jargon, greek letters, and weird symbols.

The const type qualifier is one of the jewels of the C++ language design.

At CppCon 2019, I gave a lightning talk at called Make Impossible State Unrepresentable.

Update: Apparently there is a WG21 paper on this subject that goes in much more detailed than my post.

What a week we had!

This year, several of the coworkers and I at Trimble SketchUp attended ACM Special Interest Group in Graphics (Siggraph) conference.

During the last meeting of the North Denver C++ Meetup, some people mentioned that lea is more confusing than other instructions. lea is an acronym for “load effective address.”

A lot of operations of C++ require temporary values.

C++ lambda expression is a construct added to C++ back in C++11, and it continues to evolve in each version of the C++ standard.

Functional Programming in C++ by Ivan Čukić is a new book about applying functional programming principles in C++.

Tail-recursion is an important concept to understand before we can analyse the behavior of a functional program.

CMake is the de facto industry standard for the build system generator of the C and C++ this days.

Recently, I have encountered a legacy code base at work.

Automatic tests are ubiquitous in software industry these days.