While we've spent quite some effort in Ariel to get ESP to run as smoothly as everything else, large parts of the credit for making that simpler go Espressif, who are putting a lot of effort into making this easy to use despite their weird architecture. In particular, for the RISC-V based ESPs that are supported, Ariel doesn't need any special setup any more at all. (Even the binary blobs are pulled in automatically, which to me personally is a sore point, but does make things convenient; I hope we can integrate the reverse-engineered Wi-Fi rather sooner than later.)
While we've spent quite some effort in Ariel to get ESP to run as smoothly as everything else, large parts of the credit for making that simpler go Espressif, who are putting a lot of effort into making this easy to use despite their weird architecture. In particular, for the RISC-V based ESPs that are supported, Ariel doesn't need any special setup any more at all. (Even the binary blobs are pulled in automatically, which to me personally is a sore point, but does make things convenient; I hope we can integrate the reverse-engineered Wi-Fi rather sooner than later.)