ESP32 Forum

I'm a bit confused with these. Can I compile the examples from ESP8266 and flash them into an ESP-WROOM-32?
I'm trying to do that but get an error, I just wonder if they are incompatible microcontrollers

You're correct that they are different, the ESP32 cannot run code compiled for ESP8266.

Overall, the two programming environments are different. The ESP8266 has a non-OS SDK and an RTOS SDK which are two separate development environments for that chip. The ESP32 has "IDF" - the IoT Development Framework - which is RTOS based.

There are some similarities between the APIs to make porting code from ESP8266 to ESP32 a little easier, but it requires some manual porting work.

If you're using Arduino then the APIs are quite similar, so sketches for ESP8266 may work when compiled in Arduino for ESP32 depending on which features they use.

Thanks for the quick reply. I started recently, still struggling a bit with the tools and toolchain. I installed the Unofficial Development Kit and started with the sample projects in examples/ESP8266 that compile but cannot flash into ESP32.
There are other projects in esp-idf/examples, I assume these are for ESP32 and for ESP-WROOM-32, right? My problem is I can't compile them from Eclipse.

Howdy and welcome.

Maybe this video might help you on your Eclipse/ESP32 journey?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYh2w0HzS7s