Simple Directmedia Layer

http://www.libsdl.org/

SDL is a popular, mature, cross-platform games-programming library written in CeeLanguage. Its major goals are:

• Be fast enough to write good modern games with.
• Be easy to use for people porting Windows games to it.

There are interfaces to SDL from several languages other than C including PerlLanguage (PerlSdl?), PythonLanguage (PyGame), RubyLanguage (RubySdl?), MlLanguage and EiffelLanguage.

One of SDL's main draws is that it's not a FrameWork -- it simply provides straightforward, intuitive, flexible interfaces for drawing to the screen, handling mouse, keyboard and joystick input, playing sounds and music, setting up timers/clocks, and so forth.

Although many projects are written using plain SDL, there are several higher-level libraries which sit on top of SDL, and provide extra convenience for a potential loss in flexibility, e.g. ClanLib? (http://clanlib.org).