yes, but on a default n900 its won't work without some cleaning (for the reason see optification)
follow pycages advice, do not do this if you don't know how to cure any problems.

that out of the way,

i generally add the repo
deb http://repository.maemo.org fremantle/sdk free non-free

then
apt-get update
apt-get install build-essential

then remove the repo again and apt-get update once again.

as I say, it will fail because its large, but its the full set of things required for on device compilation



note, this doesnt bring in autotools or dpkg
so no ./configure stage works, and no dpkg-buildpackage will run.
(normal make files and find an alternative for packaging)

if you don't need them and can work with makefiles its certainly usable and fast.
if you need -dev headers for libraries, expect even more space, I find nowadays I can get by mostly with libliqbase-dev

hth