My majority usage of lambdas is for use with work queues (so think Java executor). With the std only the easiest way to build that is a vector of std::function.

My majority usage of lambdas is for use with work queues (so think Java executor). With the std only the easiest way to build that is a vector of std::function. But then your lambdas can't capture unique_ptrs, even though lambdas themselves have supported move captures for a long long time now. You can do this with std::packaged_task, but that has internal heap allocations for the future. Which if you don't need is just overhead, and not cheap overhead at that.