HACKER Q&A
📣 dmonterocrespo

Is it feasible to build an ESP32 emulator in JavaScript?


Is it feasible to build an ESP32 emulator in JavaScript?


  👤 dmonterocrespo Accepted Answer ✓
I’ve been looking into this space recently while exploring ESP32 emulation.

I came across this repo: https://github.com/lcgamboa/qemu/ which is quite interesting, but it’s not really a JavaScript/browser-based simulation. It relies on QEMU and actual hardware emulation rather than running in a JS/WebAssembly environment.

From what I can tell, it handles the Xtensa architecture at a much lower level, which makes sense for accuracy, but also makes it harder to bring into the browser.

It made me wonder whether a higher-level approach (similar to how AVR emulators work in JS) could be viable for ESP32, or if the complexity of peripherals (WiFi, BLE, etc.) makes that impractical.

Curious if anyone has explored alternative approaches here.

Has anyone explored this or knows of existing approaches/tools?