I was playing around with a hex editor yesterday, and compared an empty C program (main () {}) w/ the kernel, and noticed that in my compiled code there were all sorts of module references, and in the kernel the binary was entirely binary, except fora few error messages .. why is it that GCC sticks so much stuffing into my code and leaves the kernel code naked?

try compiling with -s to strp the binary of symbols, or use 'strip' command.

Then kernel is self-containing. It cannot use libc. So it has its own small subset of a c lib inside. So there are no references to libraries needed nor possible.

By default gcc assumes at least to link an program against libc. But for special purposes (like a kernel for example) there are commandline options to gcc to not linking certain stuff. It is quite complex to make a program that does not have anything linked to it. The program even doen't know by itself anymore how start running...

See the man and info pages of gcc for more info.