wrt building a native-image based clj / clojure tool on windows, is it a bit of a catch 22 situation? one work-around is to use the method borkdude used for clj-kondo -- build an appropriate uberjar and hand that off to native-image (w/ the -jar) option. if interested, some of the details are summarized at: https://gist.github.com/sogaiu/e079cd770051685c46ab24b6658effcf once there is one working clj / clojure native-image binary, it seems like that might be enough for subsequent builds of clj / clojure...bootstrapped
fwiw, boot is also going to take this direction (a binary as the initial launch command)