1. At a computer system including at least one processor and a memory, in a computer networking environment including a plurality of computing systems, a computer-implemented method for providing a generic software function for a plurality of data types in a distributed environment, the method comprising: an act of receiving a portion of software code for a distributed software application, the software code being written as a generic function in a computer programming language that supports reflection; an act of presenting a function signature at runtime to a just-in-time (JIT) compiler, the function signature describing which of a plurality of input and output data types the generic function is configured to work with; and an act of implementing reflection at runtime to resolve each generic function to a function pointer after compilation by the JIT.