ESP-IDF now supports Apache Mynewt NimBLE host stack which is specifically ported for ESP32 platform and FreeRTOS. NimBLE is an open-source Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) or Bluetooth Smart stack (both host and controller) fully compliant with Bluetooth 5 specifications and with support for BLE Mesh. More details can be found here: https://github.com/apache/mynewt-nimble. NimBLE, being BLE only, is a footprint optimised stack and can be used in a variety of applications involving BLE.
The porting layer is kept cleaner by maintaining all the existing APIs of NimBLE along with a single ESP-NimBLE API for initialisation, making it simpler for the application developers. The documentation of NimBLE APIs can be found at: https://mynewt.apache.org/latest/networ ... user-guide.
NimBLE support is now made available in IDF master branch for ESP-IDF V4.0 release. ESP-NimBLE API documentation can be found here: https://github.com/espressif/esp-idf/tr ... mble_hci.h. The ported examples are here: https://github.com/espressif/esp-idf/tr ... oth/nimble