# JavaScript modules — A background on modules

> JavaScript programs started off pretty small — most of its usage in the early days was to do isolated scripting tasks, providing a bit of interactivity to your web pages where needed, so large scripts were generally not needed.

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## Knowledge

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JavaScript programs started off pretty small — most of its usage in the early days was to do isolated scripting tasks, providing a bit of interactivity to your web pages where needed, so large scripts were generally not needed. Fast forward a few years and we now have complete applications being run in browsers with a lot of JavaScript, as well as JavaScript being used in other contexts (Node.js, for example).

Complex projects necessitate a mechanism for splitting JavaScript programs into separate modules that can be imported when needed. Node.js has had this ability for a long time, and there are a number of JavaScript libraries and frameworks that enable module usage (for example, other CommonJS and AMD-based module systems like RequireJS, webpack, and Babel).

All modern browsers support module features natively without needing transpilation. It can only be a good thing — browsers can optimize loading of modules, making it more efficient than having to use a library and do all of that extra client-side processing and extra round trips. It does not obsolete bundlers like webpack, though — bundlers still do a good job at partitioning code into reasonably sized chunks, and are able to do other optimizations like minification, dead code elimination, and tree-shaking.

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