My view is that this really needs a good discussion and regardless of the desicions made - resource allocation to move it forward. Whatever the intent was originally for the PDO and and regardless of what the docs say about it, as Christoph has linked and quoted, the reality is PDO is everywhere. Doctrine? Based on PDO. Yii 1/2 ActiveRecord? PDO. Laravel's Eloquent ? PDO again. You get the picture. It's all ponies and rainbows untill you start doing something besides the basic typical website (wich I tend to get more and more nowdays, as my experience growed to a certain level and projects started to get big and serious). At that point you just start to hit those annoyances with the PDO. Thank god I didn't hit a really big snag yet, but it caused me a few headaces and ugly workarounds. I just can't write a standalone script with a different driver (mysqli) in a big application - chances are I need that applications AR models, it's bussiness logic and so on. I even once had to do a major server upgrade just because of the bug in PDO - well, I have to confess it was due anyway in a year's time frame, but works great as illustration to it's problems and how much attention it gets. A lack of basic ping function: I had to emulate it by sending a "SELECT NOW()" request every 30 seconds and make sure my MySQL server has a connection timeout of atleast 60 seconds, so a long running CLI script can do it's job. I do not remember why, but I was unable to reconnect after loosing the connection - it was a while ago and may have changed since then. Still, left a certain impression.
Anyway, not to dwell on my ramblings, the situation needs a long overdue discussion. A dealogue with the respective database developers would be helpfull, if not instrumental, in changing things around. Answering to Matteo Beccati's email: Not everyone has C knowlage (nor leared it at any point in their career). On top of that it's databases we are talking about - how many people are able to develop proper drivers for DB's? And not everyone has the funding to sponsor things like these. I certanly nor have the money, nor I know of anyone who I could give the task to do it. I'm from small Baltic country - I do not think we have any brains here that are up to the challenge, atleast I have no idea of anyone even remotly in this country despite my over 10 years in webdev. My thinking is that things like these have to be spearheaded by the respective database developers with the help of the PHP core team and the community.
