Explore BOTLIB: A Minimal C Telegram Bot Framework by Redis Creator

Redis founder antirez recently open‑sourced a small project called BOTLIB, a Telegram Bot framework written entirely in C.

The GitHub repository is https://github.com/antirez/botlib . As the name suggests, BOTLIB is used to create Telegram chat bots.

Overall code structure:

Basic data structures: a global struct chatState *Chat stores all state information, and an array struct client *clients[MAX_CLIENTS] holds client file descriptors and nicknames.

Code flow: initialization of the global chat state and server socket, entering an infinite while loop, preparing fd_set, adding listening and client fds, calling select to monitor events, and handling the corresponding business logic for each ready descriptor.

1. initChat initializes global variables and creates the server listening fd stored in Chat->serversock
2. Enter infinite while loop
3. Initialize fd_set collection
4. Add listening fd and client fds to fd_set
5. Call select to monitor events, results saved back to fd_set
6. Check which fd has events and process them
7. Execute corresponding business logic

The code is clear and well‑structured, making it an excellent practice project for beginners learning network programming in C.

Future extensions may add symmetric encryption and more advanced network models, and the network I/O handling shares many similarities with Redis’s own I/O code.

antirez’s other repository failed-3d-prints-bot shows a Raspberry Pi with a network camera monitoring a 3D printer, sending failure notifications and live images via Telegram.

He also previously wrote a minimal C chat server called Smallchat, whose core is only about 300 lines of code (around 200 lines after removing blanks and comments).