Comment by 0xbadcafebee

> In addition to potentially simplifying configuration, having a daemon would allow system-wide dns caching, something I'd imagine would have been especially valuable back in the days of slow networks. Unix has daemons for everything else so that's why it feels odd that name resolution got baked into libc

Having a daemon would add complexity, take up RAM and CPU, and be unnecessary in general. There really weren't that many daemons running in the olden times.

DNS resolution is expected to be fast, since it's (supposed to be) UDP-based. It's also expected that there is a caching DNS resolver somewhere near the client machines to reduce latency and spread load (in the old days the ISP would provide them, then later as "home routers" became a thing, the "home router" provided them too).

Finally, as networks were fairly slow, you just didn't do a ton of network connections, so you shouldn't be doing a ton of DNS lookups. But even if you did, the DNS lookup was way faster than your TCP connection, and the application could cache results easily (I believe Windows did cache them in its local resolver, and nscd did on Linux/Unix)

If you really did need DNS caching (or anything else DNS related), you would just run Bind and configure it to your needs. Configuring Bind was one of the black arts of UNIX so that was avoided whenever possible :)