What does the N in nmake stand for?

Raymond

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

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

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

To distinguish the new version from the old and busted version, she gave the new version the name New Make, or nmake.

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.

Bonus chatter: What about MASM? What does the M stand for?

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

¹ The name Visual Studio wouldn’t come onto the scene until a decade later.

Raymond Chen

Follow Raymond