> interestingly, this is the first esp32 firmware i've seen that claims to support loadable native code applications ("elf apps"),

Very skeptical that this is of any use; after bootup you have, what ... 260kb of RAM? Just doing runtime linking/relocations would eat up some of that. Just how small would your application have to be to be loaded at runtime?

Maybe they don't load the whole think into RAM, but thunk it somehow (I assume that elf supports that)?