Under Windows it is easy to create a console application, which is similar to the usual C helloworld. But the application here creates a windows to show hello world - so it's fair to compare it with a similar program on GNU/Linux/Xlib.
EDIT: Yes, it is much easier to use something as Qt on GNU/Linux, but there are also abstractions around the WinAPI available, so using Qt on GNU/Linux for a helloworld example yields no fair comparison.
My Master's thesis in electronic engineering was supposed to be based on a previous work written by a maths phd in c++ on XWindows. I'd only used C and Basic before and not done any GUI programming. I couldn't believe how much code was involved to set up a few simple windows. It really put me off and I pretty much gave up and started writing my own [image manipulation] code in C. I wish I'd had the sort of resources you can get for free nowadays available it might have been a fun project!
It was the mid 90s and I didn't have unix/linux at home. In those days you had to pay for a compiler on windows and I didn't know anyone running linux. Just a couple of years later it was so much easier!
Under Windows it is easy to create a console application, which is similar to the usual C helloworld. But the application here creates a windows to show hello world - so it's fair to compare it with a similar program on GNU/Linux/Xlib.
EDIT: Yes, it is much easier to use something as Qt on GNU/Linux, but there are also abstractions around the WinAPI available, so using Qt on GNU/Linux for a helloworld example yields no fair comparison.