Drizzle database system design questions - architecture &c

Given that I have some time on my hands at the moment, I was wandering through old Drizzle database stuff – I particularly like the microkernel design principles that underlie the whole Zeitgeist of the system. Think microservices – showing once again that there’s nothing (OK, rarely) ever anything truly new in ICT!

Much of the documentation seems to have disappeared – certainly the primary sources appear to have gone (drizzle.org is no more…), so it’s a bit of warcheology (= my own port-manteau word for "web archeology").

The best document (there are a few YouTube videos also) that I could find about the system was here which (for me anyway) raises a a couple of interesting questions.

From the last paragraph from Brian Aker’s blog (at the beginning of the page) we have this:

Adopt external libraries, use open source mechanics for contributions,
keep to an open style of communication, and remove the line between
internal and external development.

which is great, but then in the following list of Drizzle features (2nd point), we have this:

• No shipped libraries

which I assume means Boost and similar? But, doesn’t this conflict with what Aker wrote in his blog?

Another bit I don’t understand is (point 9):

• Optimized field types

What are they?

And then there’s this (point 12):

• No database data formatting

What does this mean exactly?

I know that I’ve asked a couple of questions in here in breach of the dba.stackexchange principle that posts should contain one and only one question – but I believe that in this case, my questions form a coherent ensemble and the site wouldn’t benefit from splitting them up (bascially clutter!).