Design Patterns in Modern C++: Reusable Approaches for Object-Oriented Software Design

© Dmitri Nesteruk 2018

Dmitri NesterukDesign Patterns in Modern C++https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-3603-1_4

4. Prototype

Dmitri Nesteruk¹ 

(1)

St. Petersburg, Russia

 

Think about something you use every day, like a car or a mobile phone. Chances are, it wasn’t designed from scratch; instead, the manufacturer chose an existing design, made some improvements, made it visually distintive from the old design (so people could show off), and started selling it, retiring the old product. It’s a natural state of affairs, and in the software world, we get a similar situation: sometimes, instead of creating an entire object from scratch (the Factory and Builder patterns can help here), you want to take a preconstructed object and either use a copy of it (which ...