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We all know that "Debug Mode" should be used for development because compiler produces more debugging information and "Release Mode" should be used for production releases because the compiler produces optimized code.
However, lets say if you are making a software that is only used internally within the organization and code performance is not a huge issue because the software need to do a lot of file I/O and database queries. I will be very tempted to just release the software in "Debug Mode" in this scenario because those extra debugging information makes future maintenance a bit easier.
Are there still any compelling reason for releasing software in release mode in this case?
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Debugging, in computer programming and engineering, is a multistep process that involves identifying a problem, isolating the source of the problem, and then either correcting the problem or determining a way to work around it. The final step of debugging is to test the correction or workaround and make sure it works.
By default, Debug includes debug information in the compiled files (allowing easy debugging) while Release usually has optimizations enabled. As far as conditional compilation goes, they each define different symbols that can be checked in your program, but they are language-specific macros.
So building with debug information is slower.
Default Debug build is x240 times slower than default Release build. With all the aforementioned settings enabled, Fast Debug build is only x3 times slower than Release build (and that's with optimization still disabled!). The total improvement of Fast Debug over default Debug is 77x times.
Two concerns I can think of:
Debug builds often add padding to buffers. That's why sometimes you get programs that seem to work in debug but crash in release. Seem is the operative word here, as buffer overflows are just an accident waiting to happen.
Strange things happen in debug builds. I once worked on a long running application that would crash every twenty days or so. It turns out that in the C runtime a counter (used to aid debugging) was being incremented each time a malloc/free was performed. If the counter happened to overflow - kaboom! For this reason alone I would never recommend anyone deploy debug binaries - you just never know what surprises might be waiting for your customer.
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