I would have liked to wrap boost.variant<Base, Derived1, Derived2 .. DerivedN> into a smart reference that would act like a reference to Base. Unfortunetely, the variadic template nature makes this extremely complicated, especially since there are a lot of conversions cases to handle too (<Base, Derived1..DerivedN> should be convertible to <BaseOfBase, Base, Derived1..DerivedN>). Is there any way to code that kind of thing easily?