For ESP8266-based development, no official development tools exist from its creator (Espressif) beyond a bare-metal and RTOS-based SDK. Open source projects including Arduino then provide a more developer-friendly framework to develop applications with. The C++ alternative to Arduino on ESP8266 is Sming (https://github.com/SmingHub/Sming), which is an Arduino-compatible framework, similar to Nodate for AVR, which we looked at in the previous section.
In the next chapter (Chapter 5, Example - Soil Humidity Monitor with Wi-Fi) we will take an in-depth look at developing with this framework on the ESP8266.
