This chapter covers the flyweight pattern.
GoF Definition
Use sharing to support large numbers of fine-grained objects efficiently.
Concept
In their famous book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software (Addison-Wesley, 1995), the Gang of Four (GoF) wrote about flyweights as follows:
A flyweight is a shared object that can be used in multiple contexts simultaneously. The flyweight acts as an independent object in each context—it’s indistinguishable from an instance of the object that’s not shared. Flyweights cannot make assumptions about the context in which ...
