What happened to the "real" Cassandra C++ library libcql?

Question

Is there any legitimate, maintained C++ library for interacting with Cassandra? This is a disambiguation question of sorts. Searching for such software always leads to the DataStax "cpp-driver" (a bizarre and misleading name) here:

https://github.com/datastax/cpp-driver

What's odd about this though, is that libcql preceded it, and now the libcql page directs to cpp-driver, stating that is no longer maintained, i.e.

https://github.com/mstump/libcql

But the cpp-driver code seems totally different than what libcql was. In fact, the example code in cpp-driver doesn't appear to be C++ at all (more like plain C), and has no in-code commenting. It appears to be a completely different (and less mature) project. Yet, DataStax still refers to it as being C++. Furthermore, it seems to be the only maintained project that provides C and/or C++ interfacing with Cassandra. What happened to libcql? Why did it undergo some weird transformation once it was "turned over" to DataStax?

Answer 1

libcql is evolving/transforming into the cpp-driver.

As you noticed the cpp-driver is still in the works, but its main goals are to bring it on par with the other Cassandra drivers from DataStax supporting features like:

1. auto-node discovery
2. pluggable policies for routing, retries, fail-over
3. a pure C API that can be used from both C, C++, but also other lang drivers (to ensure high performance)

Some of the features are already available (mentioned in http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/datastax-cpp-driver-beta-release), while others are being worked on JIRA.

Last but not least, the author of libcql joined DataStax and he is currently contributing to the cpp-driver.