Editing Flyweight pattern (section)

{{Short description|Software design pattern for objects}}
{{more footnotes|date=May 2008}}
[[File:Linux-Mint-20-MATE-writer.png|alt=A screenshot of LibreOffice's Writer package.|thumb|Text editors, such as [[LibreOffice Writer]], often use the flyweight pattern.]]
In [[computer programming]], the '''flyweight''' [[software design pattern]] refers to an [[Object (computer science)|object]] that minimizes [[Computer memory|memory]] usage by sharing some of its data with other similar objects. The flyweight pattern is one of twenty-three well-known ''[[Design Patterns|GoF design patterns]]''.<ref name="GoF">{{cite book|author=Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, John Vlissides|url=https://archive.org/details/designpatternsel00gamm/page/195|title=Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software|publisher=Addison Wesley|year=1994|isbn=978-0-201-63361-0|pages=[https://archive.org/details/designpatternsel00gamm/page/195 195ff]}}</ref> These patterns promote flexible object-oriented software design, which is easier to implement, change, test, and reuse.

In other contexts, the idea of sharing data structures is called [[hash consing]].

The term was first coined, and the idea extensively explored, by [[Paul Calder]] and [[Mark Linton]] in 1990<ref>{{cite book|last=Gamma|first=Erich|title=Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software|title-link=Design Patterns (book)|author2=Richard Helm|author3=Ralph Johnson|author4=John Vlissides|publisher=[[Addison-Wesley]]|year=1995|isbn=978-0-201-63361-0|pages=[https://archive.org/details/designpatternsel00gamm/page/205 205–206]|author-link=Erich Gamma|author2-link=Richard Helm|author3-link=Ralph Johnson (computer scientist)|author4-link=John Vlissides}}
</ref> to efficiently handle glyph information in a [[WYSIWYG|WYSIWYG document editor]].<ref>
{{cite conference|last1=Calder|first1=Paul R.|last2=Linton|first2=Mark A.|title=Proceedings of the 3rd annual ACM SIGGRAPH symposium on User interface software and technology - UIST '90 |date=October 1990|chapter=Glyphs: Flyweight Objects for User Interfaces|conference=The 3rd Annual [[ACM SIGGRAPH]] Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology|location=Snowbird, Utah, United States|pages=92–101|doi=10.1145/97924.97935|isbn=0-89791-410-4}}
</ref> Similar techniques were already used in other systems, however, as early as 1988.<ref>
{{cite conference|last1=Weinand|first1=Andre|last2=Gamma|first2=Erich|last3=Marty|first3=Rudolf|year=1988|title=ET++—an object oriented application framework in C++|conference=[[OOPSLA]] (Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages and Applications)|location=San Diego, California, United States|pages=46–57|citeseerx=10.1.1.471.8796|doi=10.1145/62083.62089|isbn=0-89791-284-5}}
</ref>