We develop a product for internal customers. We don’t have a QA team, and don’t use assertions. Performance is important, application size isn’t.
Is it a good idea to have a single configuration (instead of separating Debug and Release), which will have the debug information (pdbs), and will also do the performance optimization?
Are there any cons to this approach?
Keep both. There is a reason for having two configurations! Use the Debug one for debugging and the Release one for every-day use.
THe cons of “merging” configurations are obvious – you wont get the best optimizations you could with clean Release configuration and debugging will be awkward. The few seconds (or minutes) needed to rebuild the project in a different configuration are worth it, trust me.