I have had simulations that run for hours, and I have had regression simulations for ASICs that would take a week or more to run on a single very very fast workstation. To run a simulation takes many instructions cycles on a computer, that is just a fact of life.
Don't try and correlate a software C compiler to a HDL simulator they aren't even close to being the same thing.
But hey don't let me dissuade you, go right ahead and believe that a 10,000,000 gate ASIC simulated for 100ms takes only seconds to run...heck my tiny design right now (< 20,000 gates) takes nearly 1 minute to compile in modelsim on a Xeon workstation and takes nearly a 30 seconds to load and run for ~275 us (the actual time the processor runs the simulation image is 4 seconds).
Another example was a design that ran for ~200 ms and was a 75% full Kintex 325T, the simulation of those testcases would be about 40 minutes on a $12K Xeon workstation.
Of course Modelsim (the real version) is a relatively slow simulator (Vivado's simulator is worse ;-)), if you want fast get Incisive or VCS. Of course that assumes you have $$$ lying around doing nothing.