To create a simple window, no it isn't. To create a rather complex application, then yes it is, compared with using a higher-level framework.

This article is complaining about the complexity of creating a simple window in Wayland, which is much easier in Win32. Wayland doesn't make creating "a rather complex application" any easier either. In both cases you would use a framework. Even more so in Wayland, which doesn't provide widgets or standard dialogs at all, while Win32 does.

Creating a simple window in Wayland isn't much harder than in Win32. You get a wl_surface, attach a wl_buffer to it, wrap it with xdg_toplevel and handle some callbacks for resizing etc. There's some boilerplate that allows all this to be extensible in backwards-compatible ways, but nothing complex, really. simple-touch example in Weston repository has about 400 lines.

Some compositor's insistence on CSD can make it a bit more complex since you get that in Win32 for free, but on the sane ones you just add xdg-decoration and you're done.

Also, this is all apples-to-oranges anyway, as Win32 is a toolkit, while wayland-client is just a protocol (de)serializer.

> Creating a simple window in Wayland isn't much harder than in Win32. You get a wl_surface, attach a wl_buffer to it, wrap it with xdg_toplevel and handle some callbacks for resizing etc. There's some boilerplate that allows all this to be extensible in backwards-compatible ways, but nothing complex, really. simple-touch example in Weston repository has about 400 lines.

I believe the youth nowadays calls what you wrote "copium". Because creating a simple window in Win32 (a whole program, in fact) looks like this:

    #ifndef UNICODE
    #define UNICODE
    #endif 
    
    #include <windows.h>
    
    LRESULT CALLBACK WindowProc(HWND hwnd, UINT uMsg, WPARAM wParam, LPARAM lParam);
    
    int WINAPI wWinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance, HINSTANCE hPrevInstance, PWSTR pCmdLine, int nCmdShow)
    {
        const wchar_t CLASS_NAME[]  = L"Sample Window Class";
        
        WNDCLASS wc = { };
    
        wc.lpfnWndProc   = WindowProc;
        wc.hInstance     = hInstance;
        wc.lpszClassName = CLASS_NAME;
    
        RegisterClass(&wc);
    
        HWND hwnd = CreateWindowEx(0, CLASS_NAME, L"Hello World! Program",
            WS_OVERLAPPEDWINDOW,
            CW_USEDEFAULT, CW_USEDEFAULT, CW_USEDEFAULT, CW_USEDEFAULT,
            NULL, NULL, hInstance, NULL);
    
        if (hwnd == NULL)
        {
            return 0;
        }
    
        ShowWindow(hwnd, nCmdShow);
    
        MSG msg = { };
        while (GetMessage(&msg, NULL, 0, 0) > 0)
        {
            TranslateMessage(&msg);
            DispatchMessage(&msg);
        }
    
        return 0;
    }
    
    LRESULT CALLBACK WindowProc(HWND hwnd, UINT uMsg, WPARAM wParam, LPARAM lParam)
    {
        switch (uMsg)
        {
        case WM_DESTROY:
            PostQuitMessage(0);
            return 0;
        default:
            return DefWindowProc(hwnd, uMsg, wParam, lParam);
        }
    }

That's significantly less than 400 lines, and requires essentially just two function calls, RegisterClass and CreateWindowEx, the rest is the message loop and its callback.

Yes, this isn't much easier than doing it yourself with libwayland-client, even despite of it being a whole layer of abstraction higher (which is obviously why it's shorter, duh). There's more to type when you go lower level, but fundamentally it's still just "get me a window, here's my content, have some callbacks". Toolkits that provide similar (or even simpler) APIs on top of Wayland exist too.