I started to use the boost library a few days ago so my question is maybe trivial. I want to compare two same type variants with a static_visitor. I tried the following, but it don't want to compile. struct compare:public boost::static_visitor<bool> { bool operator()(int& a, int& b) const { return a<b; } bool operator()(double& a, double& b) const { return a<b; } }; int main() { boost::variant<double, int > v1, v2; v1 = 3.14; v2 = 5.25; compare vis; bool b = boost::apply_visitor(vis, v1,v2); cout<<b; return 0; } Thank you for any help or suggestion!