This is a somewhat different idea but I'd like to be able to feed structured data (in memory objects) to an (user defined) awk-like script without the need to serialize/parse everything. This could be used for packet filtering, conditional breakpoints, file searching, syscall filtering and intercepting, etc. Basically wherever you need a user defined filter more powerful than regex.
The embedder can decide what variables and functions to provide for each invocation of the script. You could get something like Wireshark filters out of the box:
ip && port==1234 {print size, time}
Graphviz includes a tool "gvpr" which essentially implements this idea for processing graphs but of course, they end up reimplementing a large part of awk.
