ESP8266 Community Forum

Hi guys, I'm new here and I got a NODEMCU 12E with lua pre-installed firmware. The first thing that I've done was trying so then I configured arduino ide, it works, but I found a strange thing, for small and stupid program, arduino uploads are slowly and also occupies a lot of memory on the ESP8266 chip, so then I moved to NODEMCU lua language, tryed, it seem much faster and also I've got a lot of free memory to use. Now I went to the expressiff site, I understood that I should choose between os and non-os firmware to flash into the esp8266 and also that there are two reference guide for each one of them. If I want to use their SDK what should I do? I'm sorry for the dumb question, but I still don't understand which ide should I use or language, it seems to be C, but I'm too tired now to understand, can anyone help me?