Assembler is een van de oudste programmeertalen en wordt tegenwoordig vaak gebruikt voor hoog geoptimaliseerde toepassingen. NASM kan assembly omzetten naar verschillende binaire objectformaten zoals elf, coff, Mach-O, win32 en win64. De programmeurs hebben in de tweede helft van 2007 de ontwikkeling van NASM weer met volle moed opgepakt waardoor ondersteuning voor x86-64 en SSE3, 4.1, 4.2 en 5 niet meer ontbreken. De ontwikkelaars hebben deze week versie 2.01 uitgebracht voorzien van de volgende lijst met aanpassingen:
Version 2.01:Version 2.00:
- Fix the handling of MMX registers with explicit "qword" tags on memory (broken in 2.00 due to 64-bit changes.)
- Fix the PREFETCH instructions.
- Fix the documentation.
- Fix debugging info when using "-f elf" (backwards alias for "-f elf32").
- Man pages for rdoff tools (from the Debian project.)
- ELF: handle large numbers of sections.
- Added c99 data-type compliance.
- Added general x86-64 support.
- Added win64 (x86-64 COFF) output format.
- Added __BITS__ standard macro.
- Renamed the elf output format to elf32 for clarity.
- Added elf64 and macho (MacOS X) output formats.
- Added Numeric constants in DQ directive.
- Added oword, do and reso pseudo operands.
- Allow underscores in numbers.
- Added 8-, 16- and 128-bit floating-point formats.
- Added binary, octal and hexadecimal floating-point.
- Correct the generation of floating-point constants.
- Added Floating-point option control.
- Added Infinity and NaN floating point support.
- Added ELF Symbol Visibility support.
- Added Setting OSABI value in ELF header directive.
- Added Generate Makefile Dependencies option.
- Added Unlimited Optimization Passes option.
- Added %IFN and %ELIFN support.
- Added Logical Negation Operator.
- Enhanced Stack Relative Preprocessor Directives.
- Enhanced ELF Debug Formats.
- Enhanced Send Errors to a File option.
- Added SSSE3, SSE4.1, SSE4.2, SSE5 support.
- Added a large number of additional instructions.
- Significant performance improvements.