Why disable incremental linking in debug?

Question

In MS Visual C++ 2008 is there any reason to disable incremental linking in debug builds?

From my limited reading enabling incremental builds gives me faster linking and edit & continue.

I'm at a loss to find any reason why you'd disable this great feature. What are disadvantages? Is it flakey?

EDIT: I'm working with a solution with multiple projects (a handful of dlls linking to a couple of exes) and most (but not all) have incremental linking disabled in debug.

Answer 1

Where does the question come from? You just saw the option and decided to ask?

Generally it should work pretty well, and unless it doesn't - no reason to disable it. But sometimes the dependencies don't work properly and you need to rebuild all manually. If this happens often in your project - then you should disable it.

In complex solutions with many dependencies it sometimes can get flakey. For example, changing a file in library won't trigger relinking of the executable for whatever reason, or something like that. Obviously it's not a normal course of events, disabling the feature makes it easier to avoid the problem if it occurs.