How to debug in release mode?

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In VS, right click your project, chose “Properties”.

  1. Click the C/C++ node. Set Debug Information Format to C7 compatible (/Z7) or Program Database (/Zi).

  2. Expand Linker and click the General node. Set Enable Incremental Linking to No (/INCREMENTAL:NO).

  3. Select the Debugging node. Set Generate Debug Info to Yes (/DEBUG).

  4. Select the Optimization node. Set References to Yes (/OPT:REF).

if /OPT:REF is specified, /OPT:ICF is on by default.

That’s ripped directly from Microsoft’s documentation:

I do this all of the time and pretty much never debug in debug mode anymore. As you know, many errors that occur in a release build may not occur in a debug build (almost certainly the errors that arise from invoking UB).

Also, I work on a project which uses a ton of image processing and performs a lot of compression/decompression of large images. Using a slow debug build is simply impractical.

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