Understanding build settings

Before a project is compiled or built, the compiler requires certain details, which are known as the build settings. This is a very important part of the compilation process. In this section, you will learn about build settings and how to configure them in a proper way. You can have multiple build configurations for the same project. Usually, Qt Creator creates debug, release, and profile build configurations automatically. A debug build contains additional debug symbols required for debugging an application, whereas the release version is an optimized version without such symbols. Generally, developers use a debug configuration for testing and a release configuration for creating the final binaries. A profile build is an optimized release build that is delivered with separate debug information and is best suited to analyzing applications.

Build settings can be specified in the Projects mode. You may find that the Projects button is disabled if there...