IOTA "C" version (CClient) and feasibility of signing transactions on ESP32?

Question

An article recently has been published entitled "Running the IOTA "CClient" library on ESP32" (>>>Link to Article<<<).

It is not clear to me if by using this C version of IOTA is practicable to run PoW or signing transactions on ESP32 device?

Since in this answer (>>>Link to Answer<<<) is mentioned that:

"It is not feasible to compute the Proof-of-Work on microcontrollers due to their limited computational speed. Furthermore, the official CCurl implementation (Proof-of-Work computation in C) uses the pthreads library and other functionality which are not typically available on microcontrollers. It is, in my opinion, not feasible to run IOTA in battery powered embedded devices due to the large amount of energy it takes to sign transactions, even if the Proof-of-Work is done elsewhere."

The question is that:

• Can this C version of IOTA make it feasible to run PoW or to sign transactions on micro-controllers?

• in general, how can this C version improve running IOTA on micro-controllers? And what new opportunities does C version bring us?

Answer 1

• Can this C version of IOTA make it feasible to run PoW or to sign transactions on micro-controllers?

Not exactly, the application runs on FreeRTOS and pthread is supported on ESP32, but it's not recommended to run PoW on ESP32, you won't be satisfied with the time-spending and system resources. In my opinion, ESP32 is not a legacy microcontroller, it's system on chip(SoC) and easy to do PoC for the IoT product.

• in general, how can this C version improve running IOTA on micro-controllers? And what new opportunities does C version bring us?

A microcontroller might be 8-bit/16-bit and only has 256KB SRAM/Flash or less, what are the reasons for running IOTA on it which without network stack and limited RAM/Flash?

Considering an IoT system, many devices run on embedded systems with limited resources and usually use C/C++ for its application. Entangled is a set of libraries can provide the Tangle protocol in C/C++ besides, calling C from other programming language is not a problem.