1 ) A system supporting synchronous and asynchronous, inter-thread function calls comprising: a threaded environment, wherein such threaded environment associates arbitrary data with one or more threads and includes a hierarchical nesting of thread contexts with one or more corresponding Ul context relationships; one or more function registries, wherein such registries are associated with one or more contexts in the threaded environment; and an API, wherein such API is capable of invoking functions by name with the parameters supplied by a caller.