Question

I’m working on a problem where I’m instantiating many instances of an object. Most of the time the instantiated objects are identical. To reduce memory overhead, I’d like to have all the identical objects point to the same address. When I modify the object, though, I’d like a new instance to be created–essentially copy-on-write behavior. What is the best way to achieve this in Python?

The Flyweight Pattern comes close. An example (from http://codesnipers.com/?q=python-flyweights):

import weakref

class Card(object):
    _CardPool = weakref.WeakValueDictionary()
    def __new__(cls, value, suit):
        obj = Card._CardPool.get(value + suit, None)
        if not obj:
            obj = object.__new__(cls)
            Card._CardPool[value + suit] = obj
            obj.value, obj.suit = value, suit
        return obj

This behaves as follows:

>>> c1 = Card('10', 'd')
>>> c2 = Card('10', 'd')
>>> id(c1) == id(c2)
True
>>> c2.suit = 's'
>>> c1.suit
's'
>>> id(c1) == id(c2)
True

The desired behavior would be:

>>> c1 = Card('10', 'd')
>>> c2 = Card('10', 'd')
>>> id(c1) == id(c2)
True
>>> c2.suit = 's'
>>> c1.suit
'd'
>>> id(c1) == id(c2)
False

Update: I came across the Flyweight Pattern and it seemed to almost fit the bill. However, I’m open to other approaches.

Answer 1

Do you need id(c1)==id(c2) to be identical, or is that just a demonstration, where the real objective is avoiding creating duplicated objects?

One approach would be to have each object be distinct, but hold an internal reference to the ‘real’ object like you have above. Then, on any __setattr__ call, change the internal reference.

I’ve never done __setattr__ stuff before, but I think it would look like this:

class MyObj:
    def __init__(self, value, suit):
        self._internal = Card(value, suit)

    def __setattr__(self, name, new_value):
        if name == 'suit':
            self._internal = Card(value, new_value)
        else:
            self._internal = Card(new_value, suit)

And similarly, expose the attributes through getattr.

You’d still have lots of duplicated objects, but only one copy of the ‘real’ backing object behind them. So this would help if each object is massive, and wouldn’t help if they are lightweight, but you have millions of them.