Surviving the Release Version

This outlines some rationale and strategies for coping with the debug-vs-release problems that sometimes come up. The simplest one is often the best: just turn off all the optimizations in the release version. Then selectively turn on optimizations for that 1% of your code that might matter. Assuming there is that much of your code that matters. For a lot of the applications we write, so little code matters that you get virtually the same performance for optimized and unoptimized code.

Other References

Check out http://www.cygnus-software.com/papers/release_debugging.html for some additional useful insights by Bruce Dawson. A particularly nice point he makes here is that you should always generate debug symbol information with your release version, so you can actually debug problems in the product. I don't know why I never thought of this, but I didn't!