Its not just the compiler - MSVC like all others has a tendency to mangle code in release builds to such an extent that the debug info is next to useless (which to be fair is what I asked it to do, not that I fault it).

Now to hate a bit on MSVC - its Edit & Continue functionality makes debug builds unbearably slow, but at least it doesn't work, so my first thing is to turn that thing off.

You can debug release builds with gcc/clang just fine. They don't generate debug information by default, but you can always request it ("-O3 -g" is a perfectly fine combination of flags).