Does Java have 'Debug' and 'Release' build mode like C#?

Question

In C#, we have 2 modes to build projects : Debug and Release, I wonder if Java has the same thing. I am using IntelliJ IDEA as Java IDE and so far I haven't seen anywhere to configure a build mode like in VS IDE.

Answer 1

javac 
  -g                         Generate all debugging info
  -g:none                    Generate no debugging info
  -g:{lines,vars,source}     Generate only some debugging info

You can choose to include debug symbols in the compiled classes (this is the default) or to not do so. There is not much benefit to not doing that. The jar files will be a little smaller, but the performance benefit is minimal (if any). Without these symbols you no longer get line numbers in stack traces. You also have the option to include additional symbols with local variable names (by default there are only source file names and line numbers).

java
    -ea[:<packagename>...|:<classname>]
    -enableassertions[:<packagename>...|:<classname>]
                  enable assertions

You can also enable assertions at run-time (default is off), which is sometimes useful during development and testing. This does have a performance impact (if the code in question did indeed make use of assertions, which I think is uncommon).

Regardless of any of these settings, the JVM always allows you to attach a debugger.

What Java does not have is conditional compilation where completely different code would be compiled based on some external setting. The closest you can get is something like public static final boolean DEBUG_BUILD = true; somewhere in your code and use that in if statements. This will actually make the compiler exclude code that becomes unreachable, but you have to set this constant in the source code.