It seems that half the programs I try and install under Windows want to have a "daemon" process with them, which is to say a portion of the program that is always running and which gets a little task-tray icon from which it can be controlled. Usually they want to also be run at boot time. In Windows parlance this is called a service.

There are too many of them, and they don't all need to be there. Microsoft noticed this, and started having Windows detect if task tray icons were too static. If they are it hides them. This doesn't work very well -- they even hide their own icon for removing hardware, which of course is going to be static most of the time. And of course some programs now play games to make their icons appear non-static so they will stay visible. A pointless arms race.

All these daemons eat up memory, and some of them eat up CPU. They tend to slow the boot of the machine too. And usually not to do very much -- mostly to wait for some event, like being clicked, or hardware being plugged in, or an OS/internet event. And the worst of them on their menu don't even have a way to shut them down.

I would like to see the creation of a master deaemon/service program. This program would be running all the time, and it would provide a basic scripting language to perform daemon functions. Programs that just need a simple daemon, with a menu or waiting for events, would be strongly encouraged to prepare it in this scripting language, and install it through the master daemon. That way they take up a few kilobytes, not megabytes, and don't take long to load. The scripting language should be able to react at least in a basic way to all the OS hooks, events and callbacks. It need not do much with them -- mainly it would run a real module of the program that would have had a daemon. If the events are fast and furious and don't pause, this program could stay resident and become a real daemon.

But having a stand alone program would be discouraged, certainly for boring purposes like checking for updates, overseeing other programs and waiting for events. The master program itself could get regular updates, as features are added to it as needed by would-be daemons.

Unix started with this philosophy. Most internet servers are started up by inetd, which listens on all the server ports you tell it, and fires up a server if somebody tries to connect. Only programs with very frequent requests, like E-mail and web serving, are supposed to keep something constantly running.

The problem is, every software package is convinced it's the most important program on the system, and that the user mostly runs nothing but that program. So they act like they own the place. We need a way to only let them do that if they truly need it.