SDL API functions that don't fit elsewhere. Open a URL/URI in the browser or other appropriate external application.

Open a URL in a separate, system-provided application. How this works will vary wildly depending on the platform. This will likely launch what makes sense to handle a specific URL's protocol (a web browser for http://, etc), but it might also be able to launch file managers for directories and other things.

What happens when you open a URL varies wildly as well: your game window may lose focus (and may or may not lose focus if your game was fullscreen or grabbing input at the time). On mobile devices, your app will likely move to the background or your process might be paused. Any given platform may or may not handle a given URL.

If this is unimplemented (or simply unavailable) for a platform, this will fail with an error. A successful result does not mean the URL loaded, just that we launched something to handle it (or at least believe we did).

All this to say: this function can be useful, but you should definitely test it on every platform you target.

url

a valid URL/URI to open. Use file:///full/path/to/file for local files, if supported.

Returns

true on success or false on failure; call getError for more information.

Thread safety

This function should only be called on the main thread.

FFI conventions

Unsuffixed aliases are unsafe foreign imports; aliases suffixed Safe are safe. Functions whose callbacks fire during the call export only the Safe alias (the genuine unsafe import stays reachable under SDL3.Sys.Bindgen.Misc.Unsafe); functions curated unsafe-only export only the unsuffixed one. Each alias's documentation records its flavor and rationale.

Full conventions: SDL3.Sys.

Since: 3.2.0