The fact that the solution for everyone isn't "link against libmysql and write bindings so the interface is idiomatic to your language" will be a source of endless bugs.
This article however is about Go, where linking to C libraries is often not the best approach, so the situation is a little different.
2. One of the major pitfalls with linking against c libraries that do their own i/o is that they don't play nicely with the go scheduler. That means the goroutines blocking on a c i/o operation will occupy it's thread for the duration of the call.
But I think it’s a major design error to use FFI for a thin client library. You’re bringing in a whole other network stack for what should be some simple serialisation/deserialisation. Plus even if you were, say, linking against libmysql you’d still have a bunch of wrapper code to make it a nice API in whatever the host language may be. Not worth it.