Decorated Functions in C++… Almost

Many languages now include the concept of annotations that can be applied to definitions of functions, classes, or even variables and fields. The term ‘annotation’ comes from Java, while other languages use different names: attributes (C#), decorators (Python), tags (Go), etc.
Besides naming disparities, those features also tend to differ in terms of offered power and flexibility. The Python ones, for example, allow for almost arbitrary transformations, while Go tags are constrained to struct fields and can only consist of text labels. The archetypal annotations from Java lie somewhere in between: they are mostly for storing metadata, but they can also be (pre)processed during compilation or runtime.

Now, what about C++? We know the language has a long history of lacking several critical features (*cough* delegates *cough*), but the recent advent of C++11 fixed quite a few of them all at once.
And at first sight, the lack of annotation support seems to be among them. New standard introduces something called attributes, which appears to fall in into the same conceptual bucket:

That’s misleading, though. Attributes are nothing else than unified syntax for compiler extensions. Until C++11, the job of attributes were done by custom keywords, such as __attribute__ (GCC) or __declspec (Visual C++). Now they should be replaced by the new [[squareBracket]] syntax above.
So there is nothing really new about those attributes. At best, you could compare them to W3C deciding on common syntax for border-radius that forces both -webkit-border-radius and -moz-border-radius to adapt. Most importantly, there is no standard way to define your custom attributes and introspect them later.

That’s a shame. So I thought I could try to fix that, because the case didn’t look completely lost. In fact, there is a precedent for a mainstream language where some people implemented something-kinda-almost-like annotations. That language is JavaScript, where annotations can be realized as functions arranged into a pipeline. Here’s an example from Express framework:

Both loginRequired and cached(...) are functions, tied together by app.get with the actual request handler at the end. They “decorate” that handler, wrapping it inside a code which offers additional functionality.

But that’s JavaScript, with its dynamic typing and callback bonanza. Can we even try to translate the above code into C++?…
Well yes, we actually can! Two new features from C++11 allow us to attempt this: lambda functions and initializer lists. With those two – and a healthy dose of functional programming – we may achieve at least something comparable.