An introduction to MQTT

No, you're mixing up the ESP8266 and the ESP32. The ESP32's the one that has the 68k tinybasic derived BASIC interpreter in ROM; and it can be disabled (and generally is by default now) by blowing an eFUSE.

Shouldn't bother with the ESP8266 -- it's TLS stack sucks. The ESP32's is much better [1]; http2 from nghttp2, cjson, mbedtls, and ports of curl and libssh, reflecting the nearly half a megabyte of RAM available in the ESP32.

When the pricing between the two is so similar; there's no real point in bothering when all of Espressif's work is being put into esp-idf [2], and most of the esp8266 is based on community-only support.

Plus, the ESP32 actually has decent documentation. [3]

[1] https://github.com/espressif/esp-idf/tree/master/components
[2] https://github.com/espressif/esp-idf/tree/master/examples
[3] http://esp-idf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/get-started/index...