Flyweight Pattern

Kind: pattern

Layer: Design Patterns Core

Record: architecture:flyweight-pattern

Severity: contextual

Scope: structure, memory, sharing

Canonical: Ontology

A design pattern that shares one copy of immutable intrinsic state among many objects, each keeping only its own extrinsic state.

Listed in Architecture principles, after Composite Pattern and before Scalability.

Requires

• Separable Intrinsic State

Reinforces

• Memory Efficiency

Enables

• Shared Immutable State
• High-Cardinality Object Reuse

Conflicts with

• Per-Instance Duplicate State

In tension with

• Complexity

Tensions

• Flyweight Pattern / Complexity

Violated by

• Per-Instance Duplicate State

Severity

• contextual

Category

• Structural Patterns

Linked from

• Scalability / Performance / Optimization
• Quality Attributes
• Structural Patterns
• Severity levels
• The resolutions