How do I utilise all the cores for nmake?

Question

I just got a new quad core computer and noticed that nmake is only using 1 process.

I used to use make which had the switch -j4 for launching 4 processes. What is t

Answer 1

According to MSDN, there's no such option for nmake.

You can however make the compiler build multiple files in parallel by using the /MP option with the VC++ command line compiler and passing multiple files at the same time:

> cl /MP a.cpp b.cpp c.cpp

However note that most Makefiles don't call the compiler like this - they usual invoke the compiler separate for each individual source file, which would prevent the /MP option from doing anything useful.