[rmcclellan]

Well, you aren’t rebuilding your binary every frame, are you? I might be missing something.

Also, I think build time is super important in most contexts - what I think is less important is runtime speed when you’ve disabled all optimizations.

[sharpneli]

It’s not the speed of compilation. It’s the speed the program runs with debug build. So runtime speed.

And for games you need decent runtime speed. If you cannot run your game in debug build one has to do good old printf debugging. And yes, if you cannot actually play the game (as in over 10fps) that means you cannot run it in debug build.

[modeless]

Are you confusing build time with performance of the resulting binary? I'm talking about the latter. Both are important and both are lacking with modern C++ in debug mode.

Edit: I see, I carelessly used the word "build" to mean a compiled binary, which was ambiguous. I've changed it.

[rmcclellan]

Thanks for the clarification. I guess like all trade-offs, it's context dependent. I see the advantages of having a realtime usable non-optimized build for debugging. Since I use modern libraries like Eigen, that option has not been available to me for some time.

With "modern" techniques, the performance ceiling is a bit higher - whether that benefit is worth it depends on a lot of factors.