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 ...
