{"id":102359,"date":"2019-03-25T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-03-25T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/?p=102359"},"modified":"2019-06-06T17:37:29","modified_gmt":"2019-06-07T00:37:29","slug":"20190325-00","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20190325-00\/?p=102359","title":{"rendered":"What does the N in nmake stand for?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Visual Studio toolchain comes with a tool called nmake<\/code>. It processes files in roughly the same way as the traditional Unix make<\/code> tool. Why is it called nmake<\/code> instead of just make<\/code>? <\/p>\n

Rewind back to the late 1980’s. The Microsoft languages toolchain¹ included a make<\/code> program which we will generously describe as vaguely inspired by<\/i> the Unix make<\/code> tool: It processed files that looked like Makefiles, but its dependency calculations were nowhere near as sophisticated as the original Unix make<\/code> program. As a result, you had to play games with the order of evaluation in order to get everything built in the correct order. <\/p>\n

This woefully inadequate make<\/code> program was the source of much dissatisfaction. A developer was selected to reimplement make<\/code> from the ground up using a clean room design<\/a>, working only from the makefile specification without any access to the Unix source code. <\/p>\n

To distinguish the new version from the old and busted version, she gave the new version the name New Make<\/i>, or nmake<\/code>. <\/p>\n

It’s a tribute to the success of the new version that everybody has forgotten that there was an old and busted version to begin with. <\/p>\n

Bonus chatter<\/b>: What about MASM<\/code>? What does the M stand for? <\/p>\n

That one’s easier. The M stands for Macro. It’s the Microsoft Macro Assembler. What made it different from plain old ASM<\/code> was the fact that it supported macros. <\/p>\n

¹ The name Visual Studio<\/i> wouldn’t come onto the scene until a decade later. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s old now, but at the time, it was new.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2],"class_list":["post-102359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-history"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

It’s old now, but at the time, it was new.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102359"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102359\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}