Design Patterns in Modern C++20: Reusable Approaches for Object-Oriented Software Design

© Dmitri Nesteruk 2022

D. NesterukDesign Patterns in Modern C++20https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-7295-4_11

11. Flyweight

Dmitri Nesteruk¹  

(1)

St. Petersburg, Russia

 

A Flyweight (also sometimes called a token or a cookie) is a temporary component which acts as a “smart reference” to something. Typically, flyweights are used in situations where you have a very large number of very similar objects, and you want to minimize the amount of memory that is dedicated to storing all these values.

Let’s take a look at some scenarios where this pattern becomes relevant.

User Names

Imagine a massively multiplayer online game. I bet you $20 there’s more than one user called John Smith – quite simply because it is a popular name. So if we were to store that name ...