visual studio - invalid std::string debugger output in Release mode

Question

There's nothing fancy going on in this program, but I get garbage output. Here are the header files I'm including, in case that's relevant.

#include <cstdlib>
#include <iostream>
#include <windows.h>
#include <vector>
#include <string>
#include <sstream>

And I'm using Visual Studio 2008 on Windows XP.

Note that if I print the string to stdout, it prints "test" perfectly fine.

Answer 1

Sometimes the debugger will have trouble picking up proper values if you've compiled in Release mode. The compiler might swap around operations or move values to registers, etc.