Kotlin Can't Run Basic App in CMD error unresolved reference

Question

So I went to notepad++ and created

hello.kt

Contents of

hello.kt



fun main() {
    println("Hello, World!")
}

Next I opened cmd and typed:

    kotlinc hello.kt -include-runtime -d hello.jar

This is the output:

WARNING: A terminally deprecated method in sun.misc.Unsafe has been called
WARNING: sun.misc.Unsafe::objectFieldOffset has been called by com.intellij.util.containers.Unsafe
WARNING: Please consider reporting this to the maintainers of class com.intellij.util.containers.Unsafe
WARNING: sun.misc.Unsafe::objectFieldOffset will be removed in a future release
hello.kt:4:5: error: unresolved reference 'println'.
    println("Hello, World!")
    ^^^^^^^

Please note I am not working in intellij idea. I am trying to run a basic kotlin standalone app and have correctly configured the path to kotlinc bin folder of kotlin-compiler-2.2.10.zip

All the other solutions and problems posted on stackoverflow are applicable to people working in intellij idea and I am not working in intellij idea. Please help me to get up and running in Windows terminal using the kotlin compiler only. On my Windows machine, I have jdk 24

I think you can ignore all the WARNING lines. When I try the exact same code and command on macOS (kotlinc-jvm 2.2.0 (JRE 24.0.2)), I get all those warnings — and more — but it goes on to compile the code into a working .jar file anyway (proving that you don't need IntelliJ). However, I don't get the ‘unresolved reference’ error, which is the real problem here. I don't know about Windows, but is your KOTLIN_HOME variable set appropriately? — gidds
– gidds, Commented Aug 16 at 18:57
@gidds On my windows machine the environment variable name is kotlinc and it is correctly set to C:\Program Files\kotlinc\bin — RUMBIDZAI MUKUNGUNUGWA
– RUMBIDZAI MUKUNGUNUGWA, Commented Aug 17 at 16:35

RUMBIDZAI MUKUNGUNUGWA · Accepted Answer · 2025-08-17 17:19:16Z

2

I moved the kotlinc home folder from C:\Program Files\kotlinc\bin

to C:\kotlinc\bin

Next I deleted the kotlinc user environment variable and appended the new kotlinc home folder location to the Path system environment variable. It now works like a charm.

answered Aug 17 at 17:19

RUMBIDZAI MUKUNGUNUGWA

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