The main benefit I see of import is for client-side code, so that you can statically determine a file's imports ahead of time without actually having to run the

The main benefit I see of import is for client-side code, so that you can statically determine a file's imports ahead of time without actually having to run the code. Require is a regular function rather than a directive, and is probably needed for this framework to automatically find and load all controllers, models, etc.