Mastering Python Design Patterns - Second Edition

Real-world examples

Flyweight is an optimization design pattern, therefore, it is not easy to find a good noncomputing example of it. We can think of flyweight as caching in real life. For example, many bookstores have dedicated shelves with the newest and most popular publications. This is a cache. First, you can take a look at the dedicated shelves for the book you are looking for, and if you cannot find it, you can ask the bookseller to assist you.

The Exaile music player uses flyweight to reuse objects (in this case, music tracks) that are identified by the same URL. There's no point in creating a new object if it has the same URL as an existing object, so the same object is reused to save resources.

Peppy, a XEmacs-like editor implemented ...