ESP8266 Community Forum

I have now being using LUA on the 8266 for a while and have previously been an Arduino fan however apart from the memory restrictions of the 8266 I have found LUA and the Esplorer to be a great/better development environment.

In particular how you get instant results from your scripts rather than having to go through the compile upload test cycle all the time and the extensive support for the LUA language that is out there.

Has anybody put any thought into whether the nodemcu approach could / should be applied to other modules / environments as well as for the ESP8266?

Yup, it's call eLua and it's available for some of the Arduino chipsets. Check on the eLua website and Arduino forums. nodeMCU is a specific ESP8266 implementation of eLua built over the ESP8266 SDK which means that the nodeMCU event-driven approach is somewhat different to standard Lua / eLua implementations.