[alpaca128]

Depending on the code I've seen performance increases above 100x in some cases. While that's not exactly the norm, benchmarking Rust in debug mode is absolutely pointless even as a rough estimate.

[eyegor]

Is there any compiled language that doesn't benefit heavily from release builds? That would be interesting if true.

[pornel]

This can happen in languages that use dynamic constructs that can't be optimized out. For example, there was a PHP-to-native compiler (HipHop/HPHPc) that lost to faster interpreters and JIT.

Apple's Rosetta 2 translates x86-64 to aarch64 that runs surprisingly fast, despite being mostly a straightforward translation of instructions, rather than something clever like a recompiling optimizing JIT.

And the plain old C is relatively fast without optimizations, because it doesn't rely on abstraction layers being optimized out.

[adgjlsfhk1]

Julia, for example runs by default with -O2 and debug info turned on. It's a good combo between debug-ability and performance.