Flyweight design pattern

Our next pattern is the Flyweight design pattern. It's very commonly used in computer graphics and the video game industry, but not so much in enterprise applications.

Description

Flyweight is a pattern which allows sharing the state of a heavy object between many instances of some type. Imagine that you have to create and store too many objects of some heavy type that are fundamentally equal. You'll run out of memory pretty quickly. This problem can be easily solved with the Flyweight pattern, with additional help of the Factory pattern. The factory is usually in charge of encapsulating object creation, as we saw previously.

Objectives

Thanks to the Flyweight pattern, we can share all possible states of objects in a single common object, and thus minimize object creation by using pointers to already created objects.

Example

To give an example, we are going to simulate something that you find on betting webpages. Imagine the final match of the European championship, which...