Copy-on-Write in Win32 API Early Access

• The Windows filesystem team has released an early preview of copy-on-write (CoW) linking in the Windows 11 Insider Canary channel.
• This update builds automatic CoW linking into the Win32 APIs when using Dev Drive or ReFS.
• If released next year, this feature will eliminate the need to update build engines, tools, and runtime frameworks to support CoW.
• Initial benchmarks show a 32% reduction in build time for a large C# repo with Dev Drive and a 42% reduction with CoW linking.
• Users are encouraged to join the Canary Insider release and run benchmarks on a Dev Drive to discover the gains they can achieve.