gawk for a-Shell (on iPadOS)

[Peter Vernam]

Arnold,

I would dearly love to have a gawk interpreter that would run on a-Shell (
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/a-shell/id1473805438), but the developer of
a-Shell (Nicolas Holzschuch <another_shell@icloud.com>) tells me that "the
position of the FSF is that the GPL is incompatible with AppStore
distribution", so he cannot provide it (he has provided awk, but that does
not have many of the features that I need).  So it seems that my only
option is to compile gawk myself.  I have downloaded the source code for
version 5.2.1, but a-Shell has no gcc (or any Gnu tools for that matter,
because of the FSF's position), although it does have clang.  But compiling
anything requires header files (e.g., config.h) that are generated by the
configure script, and that fails on a-Shell (even though its default shell
is /bin/sh).  Running "uname -a" on a-Shell produces this:

Darwin pcvs-iPad-Pro-129 22.5.0 Darwin Kernel Version 22.5.0: Mon Apr 24
21:10:54 PDT 2023; root:xnu-8796.122.4~1/RELEASE_ARM64_T8103 iPad13,10

But there is no README.darwin file in README_d.

Can you offer any suggestions as to how I should proceed?

Peter Vernam