I forked the DataStax Cassandra driver when it stopped compiling on PHP 8 and most of its maintainers had already moved on. My first instinct was to write the new parts in C++. I built a Zend wrapper class, used RAII throughout, and put smart pointers around zval s—the whole modern setup. It introduced memory bugs that took me days to track down, and I did not get a meaningful benefit in return. So the driver is being rewritten in C23. I want to explain why, because “just use C++; it’s...