v0.14.0

Added

• Cross-building standalone binaries via an oam carrier. NPMJS_MCP_BINARY_RUNTIME=oam builds through oam instead of Node SEA, and NPMJS_MCP_BINARY_TARGET=<platform>-<arch> cross-builds for another target from any host — SEA cannot, because it embeds the running node as its carrier. oam's embed format is a tail trailer ([JS][u64 LE len][OAMEXEC\0]), and appending to an executable's tail is tolerated identically by PE, ELF and Mach-O, so only the carrier is platform-specific. The carrier is fetched from the published oam release and verified against its SHA256SUMS entry; a mismatch or missing entry aborts. Verified: a linux-x64 cross build from windows-arm64 produces a genuine ELF 64-bit LSB pie executable, x86-64 whose trailer length matches the bundle byte for byte.
• Runtime launcher at bin/npmjs-mcp.mjs: the published npmjs-mcp command now prefers the oam runtime and falls back to Node. NPMJS_MCP_RUNTIME selects (auto / oam / node) and OAM_BIN overrides discovery. Both paths were verified against the full MCP surface — handshake, 64 tools, live registry call, and the destructive-op confirm gate — and behave identically, because the server is a pre-bundled ESM file using only node: builtins oam implements.
• dev:oam script: oam run --check=warn src/index.ts runs the TypeScript source with no build step, type-checking concurrently rather than blocking execution.

Changed

• bin points at the launcher rather than dist/index.js directly. The fallback does not re-exec Node — npm has already started Node to run the launcher, so it is an in-process import() with no extra spawn or startup for users without oam.
• .gitignore now excludes bin/* rather than bin/, so the launcher can be re-included with a negation. A directory-level exclusion cannot be undone by a negation for a file inside it, which would have left the launcher untracked and absent from any fresh clone while still appearing to work locally.

Notes

• oam is faster than Node for this server; the launcher is not. Windows-arm64, n=12 medians, spawn to first MCP initialize: oam run dist/index.js 116 ms (0.67x), node dist/index.js 172 ms, launcher 243 ms (1.41x). npm bin entries are Node scripts, so reaching oam through one pays Node's startup plus oam's — more than oam saves. Point an MCP host directly at oam run <abs>/dist/index.js for the fast path; the launcher is for npx convenience.
• Benchmarking caveat worth recording: an earlier revision of these notes claimed oam was a regression (~382 ms Node vs ~510 ms oam). That was measuring a virus scanner, not a runtime — the oam binary was being run out of a cargo target/ directory, which the active AV rescanned on every exec. The identical bytes copied elsewhere and run once to absorb the scan started 5.0x faster (306 ms → 61 ms, interleaved and reproducible). Never benchmark out of a build-output directory on Windows.
• oam's --permission sandbox is deliberately unused. Its own divergence notes record that it denies filesystem, environment and network access, and the only grants implemented are --allow-fs-read/write, --allow-child-process, --allow-worker and --allow-addons. With no network grant, enabling it produces a server that completes the MCP handshake and then fails every tool call — confirmed empirically before ruling it out.