I wanted to give Kotlin a go with VSCode on Windows. I downloaded the zip for 1.8.20. Windows 11 cannot unzip the file claiming that kotlin-master.zip is invalid. I was successful using 7-zip. The web page I was following suggests adding the bin folder to the path. At the top level of the unzipped kotlin-master there is no bin folder.
Any suggestions?
So stupid is as stupid does. Turns out I downloaded the wrong file. I finally realised that I needed to download kotlin-compiler-1.8.20 and then add the full path to kotlinc\bin to my PATH variable.
Having done this I was able to successfully compile a Hello World example.
It does make me smil though, how a language that claims multiplatform availability doesn’t yet have a Windows installer for those who don’t wish to install Android studio or Idea.
Think of it from Jetbrains’ perspective. They already are the standard for tooling for all JVM languages. Why would they spend the resources on creating and maintaining other development stories when 99% of the Kotlin user base will download Idea or Fleet (which is their take on VS Code). The community is of course welcome to create and maintain such an installer.
Well, I would go even further and would say that not even IntelliJ, but Maven/Gradle is a de facto standard tooling for JVM languages. I’m not even sure if I have Kotlin installed in my OS. It doesn’t really matter, most Kotlin projects don’t even use tools from the OS (other than JDK/JRE).
If VSCode doesn’t use Maven/Gradle and creates just an “IDE project”, then I would say it uses a very non-standard setup for a Kotlin project.