Hi, Hartmut and I wrote a small library which implements futures for C++. I uploaded the code to the boost-sandbox vault. If you find anything odd in there (like e.g. overloading operator T()), you have to blame me, if you find interesting stuff in there, you have to blame Hartmut. The most basic future is simple_future<T>. Its constructor takes a function which returns T and spawns a new thread executing this function. Afterwards you can call operator()() to block until the thread is done and get the result. int slow_fac(int n){ if(n == 0) return 0; if(n == 1) return 1; sleep(1); return n * fac(n - 1); } simple_future<int> f1 = bind(slow_fac, 4); ... cout << f1() << endl; //should print 24 if you have two different implementations of fac and you are only interested in the result of the faster implementation, you can combine two futures using '||'. int fast_fac(int n){ if(n == 0) return 0; if(n == 1) return 1; return n * fac(n - 1); } simple_future<int> f2 = bind(fast_fac, 4); future<int> f3 = f1 || f2; ... cout << f3() << endl; // should print 24 If the result type of the futures given to '||' differ, the result type of the new future is a variant over the types. double fac4(){ return (double)fast_fac(4); } future<variant<int, double> > f4 = f2 || double_[&fac4]; //double_[] creates a simple_future<double> Similarly, the '&&'-operator creates a tuple of the types of the individual futures and blocks until all futures are done. future<tuple<int, double> > f5 = f2 && double_[&fac4]; Warning: I overloaded operator T() for futures to get a nicer syntax. int fac_of_4 = f1; // <- this works! Thorsten