Thanks for noting my misappropriation of the ADL term! I’ll amend the post appropriately when I have a moment.

I was unaware of “bcp” – it’s a shame that Boost doesn’t publicise it more clearly, instead directing people to a 40-80Mb archive of everything (and hence where I get my “dependency on Boost” from).

I tried “bcp” out for “function” and “bind” and it dropped ~8.0Mb of headers across 10+ individual Boost libraries. That quite surprised me – I consider that to be rather a lot for a simple delegate solution.

Martin.

There is no such thing as “dependency on Boost” as Boost is the set of libraries, and not the library itself.
In this case you can only speak about dependency on Boost.Function.
If you bother that for using Boost.Function you need to install all other libraries, than you should use bcp tool for extracting exactly what you need: http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_46_0/tools/bcp/doc/html/index.html

Also I would note that deducing template arguments for function template has a little to do with ADL (“Koenig lookup”).

Secondly, I didn’t want to introduce a dependency on Boost. Boost is not always the answer and is often not a welcome dependency. I’ve worked on plenty of code bases where Boost is not an option so other solutions are required.