Analysis
Compare patterns
Evaluate design patterns side by side across intent, tradeoffs, languages, and integration fit.
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Analysis
Pattern comparison
Reviewing 3 patterns.
| Criteria | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Basics | |||
| Category | structural | structural | behavioral |
| Summary | Separate an abstraction from its implementation so the two can vary independently. | — | — |
| Intent | Decouple abstractions from implementations so they can evolve independently. | Use sharing to support large numbers of fine-grained objects efficiently by separating shared intrinsic state from per-object extrinsic state. | Provide a way to access elements of an aggregate sequentially while hiding the underlying representation. |
| Decision factors | |||
| Problem | When an abstraction is tightly coupled to its implementation, changing one side forces changes in the other and makes the system harder to evolve. | A system creates a large number of similar objects, but storing all of their state separately uses too much memory. | A collection needs to be traversed without exposing how it is stored internally. |
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| Integration notes | Bridge is useful when you want one stable abstraction while swapping implementations for providers, environments, or device targets. | Flyweight is useful when thousands or millions of similar objects need to be represented efficiently, such as trees, glyphs, tiles, or UI tokens. | Iterator is useful for pagination, custom collections, ordered traversal, and any case where clients should not know the internal data structure. |