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Telegram Serverless

core.telegram.org

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Re: Telegram Serverless

#61

Post by ameliaquining »

timtody wrote: post #48
domh wrote: post #10

This is cool. I wish Signal had a bot API like telegram's.

Not having a bot API is one of the many things that makes Signal amazing

Why? Bots using the bot API can't send unsolicited messages to people. (Bots that control regular user accounts without using the API can of course do this, but Signal's not immune to that either.)

Re: Telegram Serverless

#62

Post by floppyd »

timtody wrote: post #48
domh wrote: post #10

This is cool. I wish Signal had a bot API like telegram's.

Not having a bot API is one of the many things that makes Signal amazing

Not having a bot API is what stops me from moving to Signal. I have 10-ish telegram bots running for myself, I just use telegram as UI for a script running on backend, and results are easily shareable with my other telegram contacts. I have no clue why not having this is amazing in any way.

Re: Telegram Serverless

#63

Post by ameliaquining »

zb3 wrote: post #54

I thought this was about P2P messaging (without servers, hence server "less"), but no, obviously "serverless" on HN has to mean "run code on someone else's servers"..

It's not the terminology I'd have picked if I'd been asked, but at this point it's clearly established and we might as well use it.

Re: Telegram Serverless

#64

Post by kreco »

The title made me realized that there is less and less use of the "serverless".

Which was one of the most non-sensical word to say "You don't maintain the server".

Re: Telegram Serverless

#65

Post by ameliaquining »

codedokode wrote: post #52

It looks like they are making their own cloud, with such a little team? Also we should be using Matrix but it doesn't have half of the features (no channels, no mini apps etc). Also I wonder whether compiling JS to native code is worth the hassle or not. In browser, it would slow down page load, but here you need to compile only on deploy.

This is barely a cloud, since it only serves one particular purpose and everything runs in V8 isolates. Although they would need to ensure they're appropriately capping each tenant's compute and bandwidth; the article mostly doesn't get into that.

Fully AOT compilers for JavaScript are basically research projects rather than production-ready platforms, because the extensive dynamicity of JavaScript's semantics makes this a hard problem. (The most mature one I'm aware of is https://porffor.dev.) But even if that weren't the case, the thing Telegram is doing requires V8's low-overhead tenant isolation, so they're bound to V8's architectural choices. V8 does have APIs for code caching and startup snapshots; Telegram could be generating those at deploy time.

Re: Telegram Serverless

#67

Post by _superposition_ »

dist-epoch wrote: post #24
stavros wrote: post #2

This is off-topic, but I was kind of surprised to see this page written by Claude. I guess I shouldn't really be surprised, but I somehow didn't expect it.

I finds it surprising you find it surprising. Is this the best use of a human, to write a long, detailed manual for a feature? Which most likely will be read by another LLM?

Hit the nail on the head. I find it surprising people give a fuck any more. Who likes writing documentation? Us devs being horrible at and hating to write documentation was a standard trope before llms. They do a better job and dont complain.

Re: Telegram Serverless

#69

Post by qmmmur »

domh wrote: post #10

This is cool. I wish Signal had a bot API like telegram's.

Same. I used to use telegram for everything and then stopped after I realised it wasn’t really and to end encrypted. The bots were super useful. I used to have one I could ask different bus times for. Was so much better than the app the local bus company had made.

Re: Telegram Serverless

#70

Post by codedokode »

AnonC wrote: post #21

Emphasis mine: > Each invocation runs in a lightweight V8 isolate, close to Telegram's own systems, so calls to the Bot API and your database are quick and reliable. Telegram’s servers are distributed worldwide. I understand that the calls to the Bot API may be quick because the serverless code would be propagated to the edge, but how does it handle an SQLite DB? Is that also replicated to guarantee quick access from…

I think there is no replication and each bot runs on a certain server.
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