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 | creational | behavioral | behavioral |
| Summary | — | — | — |
| Intent | Specify the kinds of objects to create using a prototypical instance, and create new objects by cloning that prototype. | Allow an object to alter its behavior when its internal state changes by delegating state-specific behavior to separate state objects. | Separate an algorithm from the object structure it operates on by moving behavior into visitor objects. |
| Decision factors | |||
| Problem | Creating new objects from scratch can be expensive or repetitive when the system needs many similar variants. | An object behaves differently depending on its internal state, and conditional logic is becoming hard to manage. | You need to perform operations across a set of different object types without stuffing all the logic into the objects themselves. |
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| Practical fit | |||
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| Integration notes | Prototype is useful when object creation is expensive, when many near-identical objects are needed, or when cloning preconfigured templates is simpler than rebuilding them. | State is useful for workflows, media players, order lifecycles, and any domain where behavior changes as the object moves through a lifecycle. | Visitor is useful for AST processing, reporting, cart calculations, and exporting object structures to alternate formats. |