This document contains smaller pieces of metadata that we consider should be emitted by the compiler. Please make any suggestion if you consider something should be added here.
Deployment and runtime bytecodes emitted by solc don't contain just instructions, but also other data that is not meant to be executed. Figuring out how many instructions they contain is not trivial and error prone.
We consider this information to be of critical importance, and propose adding this data explicitly to the compilation output.
A generalization of the Number of instructions in bytecodes proposal is being tracked in this issue: https://github.com/ethereum/solidity/issues/9332