sonnyyu:
compile some C code could take 10+ hours. No way it is too much. I rather account finger than use computer. ( I only did it at old Yun's OS)
I'm not sure what you're trying to compile on the Yun, but I've compiled a bunch of stuff and performance was OK. The only things that are going to take anywhere near 10 hours are something like gcc, or the OS distro. For compiling huge packages it obviously makes sense to cross compile but for example when I needed a "real" grep it took only a few minutes to compile and install gnugrep. Then again I'm old enough to remember when a 400Hz Mips WAS a high end machine.
For a typical user, cross compiling is a near non-starter: just setting a Debian VM is enough work! Building the openWRT distro on that is a pain (and it regularly fails!). As you noted you spent hours getting to the stage of STARTING to compile your project. Also a lot of packages aren't set up to cross compile nicely.