Deferred/Promise pattern in C++

I've recently discovered, and fallen in love with, the Deferred/Promise pattern used in jQuery. It just encapsulates so many async use cases, including the wonderful chaining, filtering ability, that I can't believe I missed it for so long.

I've just finished refactoring my AS3 code to use the excellent CodeCatalyst/promise-as3 library (https://github.com/CodeCatalyst/promise-as3), and so started thinking about going back to my C++ code and seeing how I could implement the pattern there.

Before I started coding this myself, I checked to see if it had been done before, and discovered the std::future/std::promise (and boost equivalents), but they are very heavy (they seem use real threads etc, and have a heavy template syntax).

So, my question is: Is there are lightweight, pure C++ implementation of the Deferred/Promise pattern, jQuery-style?

refs:

• pattern: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futures_and_promises
• jQuery: http://api.jquery.com/category/deferred-object/
• AS3: https://github.com/CodeCatalyst/promise-as3
• Dart: http://api.dartlang.org/dart_core/Futures.html
• C++: http://www.stdthread.co.uk/doc/headers/future/future.html