From: "bill_kempf" <williamkempf@hotmail.com> [ Tue, 30 Apr 2002 15:53:38 -0000 ]
Might not be a great idea, but it definitely is a good one. You don't have to redistribute the PDB files with your application, and who haven't been bitten by things that don't work in release mode that used to in debug? I'm aware that stepping through the source in release mode doesn't tell the entire truth due to compiler optimizations, but it still is _invaluable_ some times.
I don't agree. If it's a good idea, then I'd expect MS to do this by default for IDE generated builds.
I personally wouldn't use MS as a shining example of what they consider "the best defaults" and stand by them on it :)
There's some overhead involved in generating this, there's compile time overhead (which is important to some), and there's the fact that many users will be confused by the presence of debug information and why "stepping" through the code behaves so strangely and unpredictably.
It is damn handy to have pdb info in a release build. More handier than having non at all and stepping into plain asm-code. I've not released a release-version of an exe/dll without having a pdb around since I learnt how to use them, and is a neck-saver in certain circumstances... ... but I was only really replying to your "MS default settings" comment which I feel is a bit dangerous :) Jim M -- @ Derbyshire