I dislike that two different commands are both nam...

# kotlin-toolchain

[jessewilson]

I dislike that two different commands are both named `kotlin`:

This one is the low-level compiler + stuff, versioned with the language (2.4.0)

$ brew install kotlin
$ kotlin -version
Kotlin version 2.4.10-release-377 (JRE 25.0.3+9-LTS)

This one is the high-level build system, versioned independently from the language (0.12.0)

$ curl -fsSL <https://kotl.in/install.sh> | sh
$ kotlin --version
Kotlin Toolchain version 0.12.0 (2039c53, 2026-08-24)

I asked my teammate (👋🏻 @Bill Phillips) to install The Kotlin Toolchain, and she very reasonably used brew, and it yielded a broken outcome.

[jessewilson]

I suspect most people don’t have this problem because they’re copying the wrapper script into their projects. We aren’t doing that because we’re generating a bunch of sample projects and building them

[jessewilson]

(We can work-around this problem by copying the wrapper scripts into our projects)

[joffrey]

Yeah I hear you. We're aware of this problem. We intend to address it in Kotlin 2.5. The plan is to rename the existing brew package to kotlinc, and take over the kotlin package for the Kotlin Toolchain

[joffrey]

Note that, already now, the kotlin command from the brew package is deprecated and you can use kotlinr (kotlin runner) from that same brew package. This way, if you have both the compiler and the toolchain installed, you can make sure the toolchain is first in your PATH and you can still use both tools. I don't think that's the problem you were facing here, but since it's very much related, I figured it would be worth mentioning.

[jessewilson]

That’s perfect

[jessewilson]

Thank you

[jessewilson]

I expected you guys had a plan, I just wanted to speak up and say ‘we’re eager for you to do this work!’

[Ian Moore]

Likely a similar issue for anyone who uses scoop

[jessewilson]

Just reading a Bazel rant and Bazel's version of this problem is Reason 1

https://blog.appliedcomputing.io/p/bazels-ux-is-really-really-really#footnote-2