I was actually just playing around with AWK as a backend for CGI. Busybox provides both an AWK implementation as well as an httpd server that supports cgi hosting (https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/services/webserver/http....).

AWK is definitely limited as a language, but IMO it’s a saner choice than going with BASH.

It’s also been interesting to integrate with SQLite by interfacing with it through AWK’s “pipe to variable” mechanism.