[lmm]

> Most of the multithreaded function calls will set a flag in shared memory and return early, expecting caller to poll.

Which is exactly switching from function calls to event-driven architecture, and the problems with that are exactly the problems we're talking about.

[friendzis]

The problems you describe are inherent to indirect invocations and are related to event-driven architectures only because typical event dispatching architecture is built on non-blocking calls.

You do not even need return-early (non-blocking) semantics for these problems to manifest. You can implement a giant string-keyed vtable for all methods in your program (or use a language with advanced reflection capabilities) and will have exactly the same problems. Namely there probably won't be tooling to match caller-callee pairs, which is the core issue here.