As you may have noticed i'm quite keen on a 'base class' for the Asio Dispatcher concept - for two reasons. 1. an easy path to inject custom dispatchers into a system. (clearly cant replace demuxer at will this way though) 2. a convenient type for passing dispatchers of any kind around the system, eg. to parameterise components with a dispatch policy without forcing the components to be templates themselves (presumably they would need to be if they had to store an instance of 'any' kind of dispatcher) Is it feasible to accomplish something like this with a class something like the following (but more correct hopefully) class polymorphic_dispatcher { public: template<typename T> polymorphic_dispatcher( T& non_poly_dispatcher ) { wrap_ = boost::bind( &T::wrap, non_poly_dispatcher ); post_ = boost::bind( &T::post, non_poly_dispatcher ); dispatch_ = boost::bind( &T::dispatch, non_poly_dispatcher ); } template<typename T> boost::function<void (void)> wrap( T func ) { return wrap_(func); } template<typename T> boost::function<void (void)> wrap( T func ) { return wrap_(func); } // dispatch likewise private: boost:::function<....> wrap_; // ellipsis cause i've no idea what should be in there boost:::function<....> post_; boost:::function<....> dispatch_; }; now then asio::locking_dispatcher disp1; asio::demuxer disp2; polymorphic_dispatcher disp3(disp1), disp4(disp2); Little tools like these (assuming feasible etc) would be great additions to asio. Cheers Simon