How to make MSVC debug builds run faster

Question

We have a large C++ application, which sometimes we need to run as a debug build in order to investigate bugs. The debug build is much much slower than the release build, t

Answer 1

Use #pragma optimize("", off) at the top of selected files that you want to debug in release. This gives better stack trace/variable view.

Works well if it's only a few files you need to chase the bug in.