With Delphi (it has free hobby edition) and / or Lazarus one can build simple hello world literally in seconds. Same with QT (I do not use it as I am not fond o

With Delphi (it has free hobby edition) and / or Lazarus one can build simple hello world literally in seconds. Same with QT (I do not use it as I am not fond of their licensing shenanigans). The rest of the discussion looks like people are trying to find the best way to hurt themselves. One can easily build windows GUI "hello world" using notepad and mingw but anything more serious would throw one in a world of hurt. Win32 was designed to be wrapped into something more manageable, not used directly for large GUI apps.