Is Perl slower when compiled with DDEBUGGING?

Question

According to this slide from Supercharging Perl - Daina Pettit,

It reads,

Avoid versions of perl compiled with threading or DDEBUGGING unless you know you need them.

I know most distros compile Perl with threading, but my Perl on Debian (as observed with perl -V_ is compiled with -DDEBUGGING=-g does this slow it down?

Answer 1

Perl with debugging enabled is slower.,

Note that a perl built with -DDEBUGGING will be much bigger and will run much, much more slowly than a standard perl.

However, -DDEBUGGING=-g does not enable debugging:

As a convenience, debugging code (-DDEBUGGING) and debugging symbols (-g) can be enabled jointly or separately using a Configure switch, also (somewhat confusingly) named -DDEBUGGING. For a more eye appealing call, -DEBUGGING is defined to be an alias for -DDEBUGGING. For both, the -U calls are also supported, in order to be able to overrule the hints or Policy.sh settings.

and also documented:

Configure -DEBUGGING=-g

Adds -g to optimize, but does not set -DDEBUGGING. (Note: Your system may actually require something like cc -g2. Check your man pages for cc(1) and also any hint file for your system.)

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You can test status with: perl -D, if you see the following you do not have -DDEBUGGING,

Recompile perl with -DDEBUGGING to use -D switch (did you mean -d ?)