A Gang of Four structural design pattern that reduces memory use by sharing as much data as possible between many similar objects, separating the data that can be shared from the data unique to each individual object.
Facts
Core PrincipleMinimizes memory use by sharing as much data as possible with other similar objects, holding shared state externally and passing it to lightweight objects only when needed. 1 Connections
Associated With
Erich Gamma, Pioneers Erich Gamma co-authored the 1994 Design Patterns book that named and catalogued the Flyweight pattern among the original 23.
In Field
Sources
1. Wikipedia: Flyweight Pattern
Wikimedia FoundationLead section, history sentence
The concept was coined and first extensively explored by Paul Calder and Mark Linton in 1990 to efficiently handle glyph information in a WYSIWYG document editor.
Lead section, first sentence
the flyweight software design pattern refers to an object that minimizes memory usage by sharing some of its data with other similar objects.
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