Why does sodium chloride have a very high melting point?
Ionic compounds are different than molecular ones in this way. To melt ice, for instance, you don’t have to break the bonds in water, you just have break the much weaker attractive forces between two water molecules that are next to each other (called intermolecular forces). These types of attractive forces are much easier to breaker than ionic bonds, and so most molecular compounds have lower melting point than do ionic ones. Most ionic compounds have very very high melting points in fact.
