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What is TBL?

TBL (Tele Bot Language) is what you write inside TeleBotHost to make a bot do things.

It's not a general-purpose language for building websites or CLI tools. It's for Telegram bots — receiving updates, sending replies, storing user data, calling external APIs when you need to. TeleBotHost handles hosting; TBL handles bot behavior.

New to the platform? Getting Started. Want to write code? Learning TBL.

Commands, not event loops

Most Node bot frameworks look like this: register listeners, keep a process alive, hope nothing leaks. TBL flips that.

Telegram sends an update. TBL finds the matching command and runs it. The command finishes. Nothing stays running in the background waiting for the next message — the next update starts a fresh execution.

That makes behavior easier to reason about. One update, one command, one path through the code.

Short-lived executions

Each run is sandboxed and time-bounded. Your command does its work — send messages, read storage, call HTTP — and exits. Under load, many users can trigger commands at once without one long-running script getting tangled.

You won't find background timers or daemons in TBL by design. If something should happen "later," it's because a new update arrived or you chained work through on_run / another command.

Async when it helps

Some calls take time — Telegram's API, an external HTTP request. TBL supports await where you need the result before continuing. It doesn't push async everywhere; only where waiting actually matters.

Why the limits exist

TBL deliberately isn't Node.js. You can't install arbitrary npm packages or open raw sockets. That frustrates people who want a full server — and protects everyone else from accidental infinite loops, runaway memory, or bots that become impossible to debug.

The tradeoff: less flexibility, faster path to a working bot.