Question: Texture lifetimes

[mileswijeyeratne]

EDIT: I switched to raylib as this wasn't working. Still wondering if there is a way to do this though?

I am having some trouble with the Texture struct's lifetimes in my game of chess. Sorry in advance if there is anything I have overlooked - I am very new to rust.

My code has a moudle to handle all IO elements which currently consists of a IO trait and a implementation for a terminal but I want to implement a SDL2 window to do the same thing.

The issue is that I want to contain all the SDL2 inside 1 file that consists of a Window struct to implement IO. This means that I run into some trouble when trying to create textures as the texture creator goes out of scope after the struct is initalised. I have tried lots of different approaches such as using Rc or storing the texure_creator in the struct and having an init() function to create the textures but nothing seems to work. Here is my current code:

pub struct WindowRenderer<'a> {
    canvas: Canvas<Window>,
    events: EventPump,
    texture_creator: TextureCreator<WindowContext>, 
    board_texture: Texture<'a>,
}

impl<'a> WindowRenderer<'a> {
    pub fn new() -> Self {
        let sdl = sdl2::init().unwrap();
        let _sdl_img = sdl2::image::init(InitFlag::PNG);
        let video = sdl.video().unwrap();
        let window = video
            .window("Chess", 800, 800)
            .position_centered()
            .build()
            .unwrap();
        let canvas = window.into_canvas().build().unwrap();

        let events = sdl.event_pump().unwrap();

        let texture_creator = canvas.texture_creator();
        let board_texture = texture_creator.load_texture("../assets/board.png").unwrap();

        // Gives the error:
        // cannot return value referencing local variable `texture_creator`
        Self {
            canvas,
            events,
            texture_creator,
            board_texture,
        }
    }
}

impl IO for WindowRenderer<'_> {
    // IO impl
}

I am wondering if there is even a solution. I did some looking and found this issue which seems to say that what I am trying to do is not going to work due to the SDL2 crate structure and I would have to create the texture_creator in my main.rs. I would like to keep the SDL2 in ints own file to keep the codebase clean in a way that would mean that I can switch between rendering through a cli and SDL2 window easily. Is there any way to do this?

[Cobrand]

There is a feature called unsafe-textures which removes the lifetime on textures, but the tradeoff is that by default are only "freed" when the whole TextureCreator is dropped, unless you use unsafe.