Flyweight pattern

Flyweight is a software design pattern. When many objects must be manipulated and these cannot afford to have extraneous data, flyweight is appropriate.

In the flyweight pattern, the data has no pointers to the data type methods, because these would consume too much space. Instead, the subroutines are called directly. In some cases, flyweight inheritance is performed by "shift-in" and "shift-out" data markers as a higher-level operation cycles through an array of flyweight data.

One classic example of a flyweight pattern are the characters stored in a word processor.