This is what helps me finding bugs, and debugging release code (MSVC specific) - put this around function to disable temporary the optimizations: #pragma opt

This is what helps me finding bugs, and debugging release code (MSVC specific) - put this around function to disable temporary the optimizations: #pragma optimize(push) #pragma optimize("",off) void the_function() { } #pragma optimize(pop) Usually some kind of bisection, or lucky guess is done to figure out that it's really compiler bug.