I'm currently very interested by the ScyllaDB project as it announce a database that is "fully compatible with Apache Cassandra at 10x the throughput and jaw dropping low latency". Scylla is coded in C++ (so no garbage collection) and the team behind it seems quite awesome, so why not after all.
If like me you would like to give a quick try to ScyllaDB, here is two docker lines that will start ScyllaDB and run a benchmark over it:

Please note that running ScyllaDB inside a virtual box VM on MacOSX is not the best idea to grasp what it's capable of, however here is the result I got:

[Update] A little precision by Pekka Enberg: "Please remember that the Docker image is not optimized so performance isn't all that great. That's because Scylla needs a filesystem that supports AIO/DIO properly and the only one to do that is XFS at the moment."