This sounded interesting enough that I went and found the source code on GitHub: https://github.com/Arnavion/evalr. Starred. :-)

The following caught my attention in the bash wrapper:

  coproc GAWK {
          gawk ...
  }
  
  <&"${GAWK[0]}" openssl s_client -connect "$IRC_SERVER" -quiet >&"${GAWK[1]}"

This is a cool way to make awk talk over a socket that isn't specific to Gawk. For sockets without TLS you can replace openssl(1) with nc(1). I'll keep it in mind.

Edit: You can also use http://www.dest-unreach.org/socat/ and https://nmap.org/ncat/ with awk:

  socat "OPENSSL:$host:$port" 'EXEC:awk ...'
  
  socat "TCP:$host:$port" 'EXEC:awk ...'
  
  ncat --exec '/usr/bin/awk ...' --ssl "$host:$port"
  
  ncat -e '/usr/bin/awk ...' "$host:$port"