Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Too slow"? Thats a very consumer-centric point of view. Compiling onboard is quite sufficient for most small projects, and really .. its a matter of patience, but for sure its quite usable. For those more used to the fat-IDE approach, where everything is done for you at a few clicks, its certainly not interesting .. but if you want to get really familiar with software development, doing things onboard the rPi can be…
Hooking the Pi up to a monitor and using it to actually edit on is extremely slow, once you've loaded an editor a browser a couple of terminals and maybe an MP3 player it's a crawl compared to devices anyone is used to in 2014.
For pure C/C++ projects, I use cscope+vim+make on the rPi. For Lua projects, just vim .. and a few judicious 'watch ./ make' style sub-cmds in another shell.
GUI editors are not your friend, I accept that. But there is more beneath the hood than such a dilemna as not enough RAM to load bitmaps ..