You're not. Debug builds are rarely that useful and tbh I don't understand why is there such a big fuss about it. The most difficult and most time consuming pro

You're not. Debug builds are rarely that useful and tbh I don't understand why is there such a big fuss about it. The most difficult and most time consuming problems found in production code can only be debugged and, well, understood and hence fixed in production (optimized) code only. That said, under assumption you have a good code coverage with tests, and your code uses a lot of asserts to check pre- and post-conditions, debug builds can be useful for early detection of broken invariants. I get that the development cycle is shortened through shorter compile times but that is simply the artifact of all optimizing compilers and not something which is exclusive to C++. And luckily this can be easily alleviated. Expecting to have comparable runtime performance (which one is it?) in languages backed with optimizing compilers seem a bit delusional to me and even more so if you're in the realm of soft real-time systems.