Quite coincidentally, after having rambled about everybody rolling their own copy-on-write implementations, I’ve found severe issues with some of the COW implementations in VCL. Most notably, they employ 16 bit refcounts – which is a bad idea indeed, when used for objects that occur ten thousands of times, e.g. in metafiles. brrr.
Thus, this needs some larger fixups, work for that is going to happen in CWS cowfixes01.