The “Optimize code” checkbox in Visual Studio. What exactly does it do?

Question

The Build tab of the Project Properties in Visual Studio 2005/2008 contains the \"Optimize code\".

The documentation states that it \"... enables or disables optimizatio

Answer 1

Wikipedia has an article on compiler optimization that covers many of the basic types of optimizations.

You don't want to create optimized debug builds. Optimization affects the debugabbility of your code - some lines of code may be removed, some lines of code from different parts of a function or from different functions may be merged together, local variables may be folded together, and so on. This means when debugging your current line can appear to jump around randomly due to the code being reorganized and inspecting local variables can be very misleading - the space for a local might be reused when it is no longer needed and appear to give a jibberish result.