[sdiy] Newbie code porting question [was: The Owl: ARM fx pedal]

[Justin Owen]

Not wanting to hijack Martin Klang's Owl thread (was I the only one singing Dead Kennedy's 'I Am The Owl' after that?) but Brian Willoughby touched on a point I've been meaning to ask for ages...

"...porting a VST from a DAW to an embedded, battery-powered  
platform is much, much harder than porting a VST to AU"

In general, is it feasible to consider porting code from software e.g. a plug-in or an app to code used in embedded hardware or (in general) would there be so little common ground between the two sets of code (or the two platforms) that you'd (generally) be better off starting with code dedicated to the platform you were running?

Please realise I'm asking this question with no software dev experience and my hardware coding experience is limited to some minor Arduino tinkering a few years back :) 

Thanks,

Justin