Actually it did, exactly the dialect used by the author of OP, Gawk got some very new and, in the context of awk language dialects, advanced features recently.

https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/Namespace...

The introduction of "namespaces" construct allows it to work with older programs but also construction of "libraries" in separate files.

Anyway, I really like the OP implementation, everybody should take a look at:

https://github.com/rethab/awk-jvm/blob/master/jvm.awk

It's based on the https://github.com/zserge/tojvm/blob/master/vm.go but I consider the awk version really more "elegant" in some my-own-taste sense.