I don't really know wether this is a Boost.Thread related question or a general c++ related, but since I couldn't decide I will disturb you first ;) Maybe you have the patience to look at this minimalistic framework (I stripped almost all functionality): http://pastebin.com/m7dcc833f This compiles well and running it gives me the expected: # starting # This is A # This is B # shutting down The problem is, that I want to run the kernels as threads. Have (again) a look at the highlighted lines (27-29): If I replace 27 by 28+29 I (expectedly) get a compile error since Kernel is abstract. However if I make it non-abstract by implementing the operator() in it, it is this function (namely Kernel::operator()) which get's called instead of TestKernel::operator(). Note that Program will not be able to know about the concrete child classes of Kernel so it cannot dynamic_cast<ConcretKernel*> the pointers and I don't want to use maschine-specific ways like __decltype. I imagine this is merely the old non-static member function pointer problem, however I tried dozens of ways to get around this and the only thing that worked was to add a ConcreteKernel::run() { thread t(*this); t.join(); } to *each* single child class of Kernel which gets rather un- managable with 50 and more descendants. I hope that made sense and that I didn't fail that hard, Richard Vock