The major difference between debug & release build is, Debug builds disable JIT optimization which can have a significant impact on performance,
In a debug build the complete symbolic debug information is emitted to help while debugging applications and also the code optimization is not taken into account.
While in release build the symbolic debug info is not emitted and the code execution is optimized.
Also, because the symbolic info is not emitted in a release build, the size of the final executable is lesser than a debug executable.
In terms of execution speed, a release executable will execute faster for sure, but not always will this different be significant.
Most people ship release builds since they're faster.
