Scala Functional Programming Patterns

Memoization and the flyweight pattern

Memoization is caching of oft-repeated computation results. This is a way to avoid recalculating the result again. Flyweight is a design pattern that uses memoization. A flyweight is an object that minimizes memory use by sharing. A very good example of a flyweight is Java's Integer.valueOf(int) method.

Java supports autoboxing of primitives to corresponding wrapper types. We should always prefer. Let's have a look at the following snippet:

        int someInt = ...; 
        Integer someInteger = someInt; 

instead of the following:

        new Integer(someInt);

If we happen to auto-box (int → Integer) values in the range of 128 to 127, the valueOf() method allows us to reuse the Integer object. As integer instances are immutable, we ...