I feel like that's mostly Microsoft's fault, their STL implementation is super aggressive about checks in debug builds to the point that it becomes sort of useless in heavy use/high performance scenarios. Between that and the lack of valgrind, I'm pretty glad I left that world.

Over in Linux/g++ land, it's not nearly so bad. Bounds errors are mostly handled by address sanitizer such that -O0 performance is decent. And if -O0 is too slow, there's -Og which takes slightly longer to compile and has less information for gdb.

I work almost exclusively in "g++ -O0" until it's time to release.

Clang is decent too, but I find the C++ compile times are atrocious, like almost double for my admittedly template-heavy code. And performance of the compiled output is no better.