What does MT and MD stand for?

Question

I'm trying to wrap my head around how MT and MD options are used when compiling C/C++ projects. However, without being able to expand these supposed abbreviations to meaningful phrases, I forget which one is which from one paragraph to the next. Strangely enough none of the text I've read starts by defining the M, the T and the D. What do they stand for?

Answer 1

These switches for cl.exe specify which C runtime library to link against; /MT specifies to link with LIBCMT.LIB; /MD specifies to link with MSVCRT.LIB.

The different CRT libraries are described in greater detail here. The primary difference between LIBCMT and MSVCRT is that the former links the CRT statically into your output file, whereas MSVCRT links to the VC runtime DLL (which, unlike its name suggests, is not MSVCRT.DLL (see here)).