I wrote this class to support lazy evaluation and caching of values. It seems like it would be useful for inclusion as a miscellaneous class in boost. It seems like this pattern occurs pretty often in practice, it's even the fundamental implementation method for singletons, and at least I often have tons of boost::optionals in my code, with get accessors on the classes that check if there's a value, if not call a fetch function, and then return the value. It's cleaner to just call get every single time and not worry about it. I don't consider myself a guru, so suggestions on how to make it better are, of course, appreciated. template<class T> class lazy { public: explicit lazy(function<T ()> fetch) : _fetch(fetch) { } T get() { if (!_cached) _cached = _fetch(); return _cached.get(); } private: optional<T> _cached; function<T ()> _fetch; }; Perhaps such a class is too trivial to be included, but here it is nonetheless.