libmanette offers painless access to game controllers, from any programming language and with little dependencies.
It supports the de-facto standard gamepad, as defined by the W3C standard gamepad specification or as implemented by the SDL GameController. Convertion of raw gamepad events into usable ones is handled transparently using an embedded library of mappings in the popular SDL mapping string format.
The API is inspired by the device and event handling of GDK, so anybody used to GTK should feel right at home.