Formal Protocol Description?

[AstraLuma]

Something that seems to be missing is a proper protocol description?

It makes it more difficult to write client libraries without this.

[mindplay-dk]

Bedrock supports the MySQL protocol - already supported on essentially every major platform.

Do we need a native client library?

[AstraLuma]

You can use the SQLite dialect over the MySQL wire protocol (if you have the appropriate plugin), but that doesn't give you access to the other plugins.

[adworacz]

That, and there's hidden gems in the protocol like BeginBackup that aren't mentioned anywhere.

I only discovered it because I started crawling the code to see how backups could possibly be conducted.

[adworacz]

Also, according to #1536 the MySQL protocol is broken, so that means that there's essentially no client libraries except the PHP library as of today.