Mixing debug and release library/binary - bad practice?

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Is it a bad practice to use a release version of 3rd party library in debug binary?

I am using a 3rd party library and compiled a release .lib library. My exe is in debug mode development. Then I got: 

error LNK2038: mismatch detected for '_ITERATOR_DEBUG_LEVEL': value '0' doesn't match value '2' in test1.obj

After some googling I found that is because I am trying to mix release with debug, and I should probably compile the library in debug mode or otherwise muddle with the _ITERATOR_DEBUG_LEVEL macro. But I am just curious if that is the recommanded way and why. It just seem cumbersome that I need to compile and keep a record of both release and debug binaries for every 3rd party library I intend to use, which will be many very soon, while having no intention to debug into these code.

visual-studio-2010 visual-studio c++
3 Answers

Mixing debug and release library/binary is good and very useful practice.

Debugging a large solution (100+ projects as an example) typically is not fast or even could not be possible at all (for an example when not all projects can be built in debug). Previous commentators wrote that debug/release binary could have different alignment or another staff. It's not true. All linking parameters are same in debug and release binaries because they depends on the same architecture.

You have to remove all optimizations (/Od) from the selected project. Then assign a release c++ runtime.

The issue came because you have defined _DEBUG in the project. Remove the macro from the definitions (Project->Properties->Preprocessor->Preprocessor Definitions).

If the macro isn't in the Preprocessor Definitions, then you have to add it in "UndefinePreprocessorDefinitions".

user_113751380
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