> Can someone fill me in as to why gcc has not been ported to pic micro
when
> there are 68HC11 ports even.  Is it purely because of the architectural
> differences or has noone got down to doing it?

This is a RAF (regularly asked question, frequency ~quarterly).
The main problem in re-targeting gcc to a PIC (I don't think anyone
thinks about creating a self-hosted development system) is the
PIC architecture that is quite hostile to the concept of a stack/base
pointer. It could be done, but the generated code would either
consist of opcode clusters that emulate a mainstream CPU
(take a look at code created by Medium PIC-C and shiver), or
the code would need to be interpreted by the PIC (compacter,
but also slower). Even a lowly 6800 is MUCH more a mainstream
CPU than the PIC.
The natural way to create fast and compact code for a PIC is
to use a simulated stack, which is another way of saying that
recursion is excluded and all variables (global and local) get
a fixed address.
But if you ant to give it a try yourself.... It might be interesting to
compare your experience with mine (I wrote a PIC compiler from
scratch, for a pascal-like language).

Wouter.