A few little ideas that could eventually be joined to be a single GSoC project: - Allow visitation for Any. This can actually be generalized to any object that exposes a type_info, such as polymorphic objects. Techniques, including non-portable ones based on name mangling, could be experimented to get more efficient dispatch. - Add SBO to any. - Improve variant so that the functor doesn't require to expose a result_type. The result_type can be automatically deduced by "joining" all the possible return types obtained by boost::result_of. - Allow the easy construction of a visitor from lambda expressions, with a syntax like variant<int, std::string> a = "foo"; int b = match(a).with( args<int>(_1), args<std::string>(size(_1)) ); instead of the potentially more verbose struct my_visitor : static_visitor<int> { int operator()(int a) { return a; } int operator()(const std::string& b) { return b.size(); } }; variant<int, std::string> a = "foo";; int b = apply_visitor(my_visitor(), a);