[mattnewport]

I think slow debug performance is a bigger problem for games than many other applications. It's annoying for everyone but the nature of games as interactive experiences means you often have to play a game to reproduce a bug easily and often with a full production level where the bug was reported, not with simpler test content. If you can't maintain a playable frame rate in debug builds this can be a problem.

This problem was worst in my experience in the Xbox 360 / PS3 generation because the in order processors handled debug builds very poorly and were different enough from a PC that it was common to have to debug on target rather than on a PC build on a much more powerful development machine. It's less of an issue with current generation consoles that are basically PCs as they don't suffer as badly with debug performance and many issues can be debugged on a PC build on a more powerful system. It may be more of an issue for mobile still.

Fortunately many of the newer features of C++ 17 and 20 help both with improving debug performance and with simplifying / reducing the need for "weird template meta-programming". Several also help with compile times and modules in particular are quite focused on tackling the biggest root cause of slow compiles in C++.