October 13, 2022
Kotlin is not available in the standard Fedora package set. Why? It may have to do with JRE dependencies.
Kotlin runs on the Java virtual machine, so if you are going to use Kotlin outside of Android you would need to install the JRE (and according to the experts at least 4 versions of the JRE). This multiple version dependency is the reason the Fedora people have decided not to try to include Kotlin in the Fedora package set. Clearly a mess somebody should clean up.
I have seen some tutorials that tell you to install "sdkman" (also not in the Fedora packages), and then use SDKman to install Kotlin. After installing at least some version of the JRE.
All of this is inconvenient and/or confusing and I have never tried to tackle it. The first step would probably be to see if I could install java. I have something called "java" installed, but no javac. There is no "javac" in the fedora packages. There is "javacc", but it is essentially "yacc" written in java which is hardly what I want. More confusion.
SDKman is software to manage having multiple versions of java on your machine. It certainly sounds like a nightmare and something you would indeed want to manage if not avoid altogether. But we know about this nightmare in another form in the Python world with Python2 and Python3. Don't get me started. Shoot the developers.
Adventures in Computing / tom@mmto.org