How up to date is OpenStep as a development Environment?

Question

Long time ago, the Game Developer magazine published an article about ID Software and their DOOM game. In the article ID states that they used a NeXT Step machine for development with GNU GCC cross compiler. Quoting:

By writing in ANSI C on NeXTStep, Id Software is able to develop and test in a true programmer’s environment. Then, using a network, developers are able to send the code to a test PC running DOS and recompile what they are working on to run the game on its natural environment.

NextStep evolved into Cocoa, and other OSes have grown with other UI frameworks, GTK, Qt, MFC, etc...

Saying that one wants to get a "real development environment" has the OpenStep project evolved in a way that it can compete with Cocoa/MFC/GTK/Qt?

Judging only by the project screenshots it looks like the framework stopped in time, the widgets are not as nice as the ones from the other frameworks I've stated, but ugliness is not a software development measure, how is the support, maturity and completeness of OpenStep widgets?

Answer 1

This podcast might be of interest to you.

Answer 2

"Real development environment", at the time, meant "something better than DOS". NextStep and OpenStep were ahead of their time, but a lot of time has passed since then.

Cocoa on Mac OS X is a nice development environment, but it is not clearly superior to other currently popular development environments. (It's better than MFC or VB6, but Java and .NET developers wouldn't be wowed by it.)

Answer 3

Cocoa is OpenStep. It's a direct descendant. OpenStep became Yellow Box became Cocoa.

By asking "has the OpenStep project evolved" it sounds like you're asking about GNUstep, not OpenStep.