[jrockway]

I've honestly never had a problem cross-compiling for the Raspberry Pi. I learned my lesson back when it first came out; I needed a new ntpd and it took 24 hours to build on the Pi. I then realized the settings were wrong and spent about 20 minutes setting up the cross-compilation machinery on my x86 Linux box instead of waiting another day. "apt-get install crossbuild-essential-armhf" and some configuration and your build is done in seconds. Well worth it.

Modern languages are even easier. I can build a Go binary for the Raspberry Pi by setting one or two environment variables; "GOARCH=arm GOOS=linux go build ./whatever". Wonderful.

The Raspberry Pi has improved since the original. I recently needed llvm compiled from source and it only took on the order of hours on a Pi 4. (GCC was unusable, though; uses too much memory. Had to use clang from the package manager to build a new LLVM. The efficiency was impressive.)

[jcoffland]

Finding the right parameters to cross compile each dependency you need is tedious. Sure some packages are easy to cross compile but it's much easier to set up an emulated build environment and then compile everything normally.