I didn't realise this was a goal, but it's good that it was. C++'s prime faults tend to be spiteful iteration time (common cause: too many templates) and appalling performance in unoptimized builds (common cause: too many function calls, possibly due to overloaded operators and overly-finely-grained code that relies on inlining not to run like shit).

The famous maxim about how much cleverer you have to be to debug code than to write it always applies! No need to make things worse by forcing yourself to debug the optimized build.