Request: publish linux-ppc64le SEA binary (breaks POWER8+ / ppc64le users)

Summary

Starting in v2.1.113, @anthropic-ai/claude-code ships as a dispatcher package that resolves to a platform-specific SEA (Single Executable Application) binary via optionalDependencies. The supported platform list is hardcoded in install.cjs and cli-wrapper.cjs:

• darwin-arm64, darwin-x64
• linux-x64, linux-x64-musl
• linux-arm64, linux-arm64-musl
• win32-x64, win32-arm64

No linux-ppc64le variant exists. Users on IBM POWER architectures (POWER8, POWER9, POWER10, POWER11 — all of which run mainstream Linux distributions and a modern Node.js) get:

$ claude --version
Error: claude native binary not installed.
...

Last working version: 2.1.112

Pinning to v2.1.112 (the last pure-JavaScript release) works fine on ppc64le. v2.1.112 is now two patch versions behind and will keep drifting further.

Why ppc64le is a legitimate target

• IBM Cloud Power Systems Virtual Servers (production ppc64le hosts)
• Financial services / HPC shops running POWER for inference and data workloads
• The vLLM project recently added ppc64le CPU backend support (vllm-project/vllm#37586) — demand for AI tooling on POWER is real and growing
• s390x (another IBM arch) is already supported by vLLM and increasingly by AI tooling; parity for ppc64le is reasonable

I've been running Claude Code on an IBM POWER S824 (16 cores / 128 SMT threads, 512 GB RAM, Ubuntu 20.04) for several months without issues — the codebase is platform-neutral Node.js. The only blocker is the SEA dispatcher refusing to resolve a binary for my arch.

Proposed fix

Publish an @anthropic-ai/claude-code-linux-ppc64le companion package alongside the existing linux-x64 and linux-arm64 binaries, and add the entry to the PLATFORMS map in install.cjs / cli-wrapper.cjs:

'linux-ppc64': { pkg: PACKAGE_PREFIX + '-linux-ppc64le', bin: BINARY_NAME },

(Note: Node's os.arch() returns ppc64 on ppc64le Linux — the platform key would be linux-ppc64 on the consumer side even though the package name uses ppc64le. Same pattern as @img/sharp.)

Alternative: restore a pure-JS fallback path

If shipping ppc64le SEA binaries isn't on the roadmap, keeping cli.js as a pure-JS entrypoint (as in v2.1.112 and earlier) would let any platform with Node.js ≥ 18 keep running Claude Code without needing a platform-specific binary at all. That's what worked fine for the first two years of the product.

Environment

• OS: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on ppc64le
• Node: v22.22.2 (built from source on POWER8)
• CPU: IBM POWER8 S824, 128 threads
• Tested: @anthropic-ai/claude-code@2.1.112 — works. @2.1.113 through @2.1.114 — fails with claude native binary not installed.

Thanks for considering.