Toward an architecture for quantum programming

TL;DR

This paper proposes a high-level quantum programming language integrated with classical control, enabling compact expression, automatic simplification, and hardware independence for quantum algorithms, facilitating the development of practical quantum computing devices.

Contribution

It introduces a template high-level quantum language with runtime environment and implementation, bridging classical and quantum programming for practical quantum device control.

Findings

Language can express existing quantum algorithms compactly.

Supports automatic, hardware-independent circuit simplification.

Preliminary C++ implementation demonstrates feasibility.

Abstract

It is becoming increasingly clear that, if a useful device for quantum computation will ever be built, it will be embodied by a classical computing machine with control over a truly quantum subsystem, this apparatus performing a mixture of classical and quantum computation. This paper investigates a possible approach to the problem of programming such machines: a template high level quantum language is presented which complements a generic general purpose classical language with a set of quantum primitives. The underlying scheme involves a run-time environment which calculates the byte-code for the quantum operations and pipes it to a quantum device controller or to a simulator. This language can compactly express existing quantum algorithms and reduce them to sequences of elementary operations; it also easily lends itself to automatic, hardware independent, circuit simplification. A publicly available preliminary implementation of the proposed ideas has been realized using the C++ language.