[jonsen]

Code written by one couldn't be ported to the other, but had to be rewritten.

That’s not my experience. I once ported a program from the 6800 (the mother of the 6502) to the Z80. It was very straight forward. But to my surprise the version on the much “fancier” Z80 turned out to be both larger and slower despite the Z80 ran a little faster clock speed.

[floofy222]

I don't think the OP literally meant that porting code was impossible, but rather, that it was very hard to do so and have the result run efficiently.

[Arnt]

(OP speaking for himself:) When I ported Z80 code to the 6502 literally, the result didn't use the zero page to its full effect, because the zero page was so much bigger than the Z80's extra registers. When I ported 6502 to Z80 literally (I mean code that used the zero page well), too much of the zero-page work had to be replaced with memory work and not enough with the nice fast registers.