Java users quite often distribute their code compiled in debug mode. This improves error diagnostics while performance penalty for having debug information in class files is negligible. Java doesn't have compile-time optimization since version 1.3 (for 8 years by now).
That is why I was amazed to see that C# Debug version of my test was 14.5 times slower compared to Release (compiled as /optimize+ /checked- /debug-). I could have imagined such difference for C++, but not for C# that also has just-in-time (JIT) optimization at run-time.
