> I understand and kinda appreciate the nice (apparent) simplicity of a dedicated "import", especially as you will use it a ton, but I also like the bluntness o

> I understand and kinda appreciate the nice (apparent) simplicity of a dedicated "import", especially as you will use it a ton, but I also like the bluntness of Zig where it's not special (well, it has a macro), and you're explicitly doing the assignment: That is exactly how CommonJS worked for the longest time: const module = require('url') The short end of the stick was the export syntax for CJS, which is basically just assigning a property to an object: module.exports.value = 'foo' The problem solve with the import syntax is that is statically parseable, you just need to parse the top-level of a package to find its dependencies. The explicit export is also a god-send for tooling, which can have a lot of introspection from it, without executing any code.