Flyweight Pattern for Memory Efficiency

Some applications must hold huge numbers of similar objects: characters in a document, tiles in a game, particles in a simulation.

Naively creating one full object per element can exhaust memory. The Flyweight pattern attacks this directly.

Flyweight splits an object state into two parts:

• Intrinsic state: shared, context-independent (e.g. a glyph shape).
• Extrinsic state: unique per use, passed in from outside (e.g. position).

Only the intrinsic part is stored once and reused.