[fpc-pascal] getting started with threads

[Marco van de Voort]

In our previous episode, Jonas Maebe said:
> > I use own lockfree FIFO http://www.emadar.com/fpc/lockfree.htm to  
> > distribute task between threads
> > its much faster and well scaling on multicore.
> 
> Note that it won't work as is on non-x86 machines, because it's  
> missing memory barriers (and I think that you may actually need memory  
> barriers on x86 too). Atomic operations are not memory barriers by  
> themselves, and the fact that you perform an atomic operation does not  
> mean that afterwards all cpu's will immediately see this new value.

Afaik memory barriers (s/lfence etc) are only needed for I/O mapped memory 
on x86.

But if you look at the MSDN help for interlocked* functions, you'll seean
additional requirement that the arguments are 4-byte aligned. (which might
be a requirement of the lock prefix).