Why does a C/C++ program often have optimization turned off in debug mode?

Question

In most C or C++ environments, there is a "debug" mode and a "release" mode compilation.
Looking at the difference between the two, you find that the debug mode adds the debug symbols (often the -g option on lots of compilers) but it also disables most optimizations.
In "release" mode, you usually have all sorts of optimizations turned on.
Why the difference?

Answer 1

Another crucial difference between debug and release is how local variables are stored. Conceptually local variables are allocated storage in a functions stack frame. The symbol file generated by the compiler tells the debugger the offset of the variable in the stack frame, so the debugger can show it to you. The debugger peeks at the memory location to do this.

However, this means every time a local variable is changed the generated code for that source line has to write the value back to the correct location on the stack. This is very inefficient due to the memory overhead.

In a release build the compiler may assign a local variable to a register for a portion of a function. In some cases it may not assign stack storage for it at all (the more registers a machine has the easier this is to do).

However, the debugger doesn't know how registers map to local variables for a particular point in the code (I'm not aware of any symbol format that includes this information), so it can't show it to you accurately as it doesn't know where to go looking for it.

Another optimization would be function inlining. In optimized builds the compiler may replace a call to foo() with the actual code for foo everywhere it is used because the function is small enough. However, when you try to set a breakpoint on foo() the debugger wants to know the address of the instructions for foo(), and there is no longer a simple answer to this -- there may be thousands of copies of the foo() code bytes spread over your program. A debug build will guarantee that there is somewhere for you to put the breakpoint.