[andy_ppp]

Yes it's definitely not about winning, if you can get say 75% of Redis performance with simpler and memory safe code I'd say that is a big win and great advertising for the book! And maybe some examples of how performance can be improved/optimisations made also improves the book!

[reconditerose]

You might be able to get near 100% of Redis performance without a lot of tuning. Redis has a lot of overhead to make it a production ready system like performance counters, safety checking, and conditionals for features like replication/clustering/etc which slows it down.

Hell, you might even be able to use a concurrent hash map implementation and show multi-threaded performance much better than Redis :).