There are a lot of options available to provide to native_image, including:

• User's guest flags, properties, and module path flags
• Flags used by the Native Image build process (i.e. tuning Points-To and so on)
• Language and tool enablement flags
• Selection of GC, compiler backend, libc implementation
• C compiler and linker options
• Resources, reflection configurations, JNI configurations
• Java VM options, of several kinds
  • Runtime-default VM options
  • "Host" VM options
  • VM options for the Native Image build itself

Obviously, modeling all of these in Bazel is not feasibly, and would couple this rule set too hard to the native-image tool, which is evolving all the time. extra_args is available as an escape hatch for flags which have no typed integration, but can we do better?

Bazel has custom flags, configurations, transitions, and so on, which can be useful here.

Where Bazel itself provides built-in options which relate to native-image (i.e. copt, compilation_mode, and so on), issue #78 covers that functionality.