The ESP8266 community has their own, community-developed GCC port for the LX106 that they use. It was one of the reasons that it took so long for there to be a practical way to run your own code on it. I believe it was based on an existing out-of-tree port for one of the other not-quite-compatible chips in the family.

I'd be interested in running Rust on the ESP8266 - are you aware of any efforts of getting LLVM to work on the LX106?

the C backend to LLVM was the most promising way to get Rust on a lot of embedded devices, sadly, it has stalled.

Yeah it is. Maybe there is something about the Tensilica cores, as the ESP8266 still hasn't got a real contender? Apparently they have a special toolchain that lets customers create customized cores in a more or less automated way, and they started as a dataplane/DSP company in the 90s. Quite weird.

Not sure what the competition looks like. I saw this the other day but I haven't read much more about it: http://hackaday.com/2016/07/28/new-chip-alert-rtl8710-a-chea...

True, that one looked ok, but 48k of RAM is a step down, and I don't see any other peripherals (e.g. bluetooth) that would make me want to switch.

The first real contender to the ESP8266 is set to release September 1st: the successor to the ESP8266, the ESP32 - now with dual Tensilica cores (and a bunch of other stuff).

I'm waiting for this one to drop like a little girl for a pony on christmas. Hope its not gonna be a disappointment for some reason.