The document discusses the flyweight pattern, which uses sharing to efficiently support large numbers of fine-grained objects. An application may use many objects, but most objects' state can be made extrinsic. By removing extrinsic state and replacing groups of objects with relatively few shared objects, storage costs can be reduced. The flyweight pattern defines an interface for flyweights to receive extrinsic state, with concrete flyweights implementing storage for intrinsic state. A flyweight factory manages the shared flyweight objects.