Does there exist a practical application of calling a program with neither instruction data nor a list of accounts?

Question

Each instruction in a transaction can include:

• The address of a program to invoke
• A list of accounts the program can access during its execution
• A byte buffer of instruction data

Can you give an example of a practical application – in use today – of an instruction that invokes a program by address, but has neither a list of accounts, nor instruction data?

Answer 1

Your program could log 10Kb of data every time it's invoked, preventing public explorers from showing execution logs about the remaining CPIs.

Example: Program DpqbTera2sSAjwjJewqrXof5hzUzMdKUd4hsUvgxEMm8 does this, but has ix data, but theoretically not necessary. Example explorer link

Answer 2

The get_minimum_delegation instruction in the stake program is another example, but it isn't currently active on mainnet. It does take instruction data, however.

https://github.com/solana-labs/solana/blob/f2f1dab5ea7ac66757b85e88ddd5cc9846e5640c/sdk/program/src/stake/instruction.rs#L256