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crazy4pi314
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Jan 23, 2021
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| As a quantum computing physicist, at some point you might have wondered which language to use for programming and testing quantum algorithms, especially taking into account that the wide variety of quantum-programming languages is growing every day. This expansion naturally enriches the quantum programming environment and fosters the understanding and designing of quantum algorithms, but it also raises some questions. For instance, you might consider not only which language is the most appealing to you, but also which is best suited to be translated into instructions that an actual quantum platform can implement. For that, one should consider which compilers and intermediate representations work with these languages. And before we go on, I know, the words compiler or intermediate representation might sound scary if you have a physics background, like me, rather than a computer science one. But at the same time, I believe it is exciting to dive deeper into the programming of a quantum algorithm and come a step closer to what is, at the end, the final goal of any algorithm researcher: to run it on a quantum platform. | ||
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| An intermediate representation is – as its name indicates – an intermediary step in the workflow between the source code and the hardware itself. It should allow you to represent different kinds of source code before the specific platform is specified. Moreover, at this intermediate level it is also possible to perform some optimization and circuit rearrangement that makes the final implementation more efficient. Some examples of intermediate representations are [OpenQASM](https://github.com/QISKit/openqasm) (used by IBM for Qiskit) or [Quil](https://github.com/rigetti/quil) (used by Rigetti) and of course the topic of this blog entry: the Quantum Intermediate Representation (QIR) by Microsoft. |
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openqasm is used by more than just IBM, I think a lot of tools can use it (including circ and Q# with a community extension). IBM maintains a spec for and distributes it with a permissive license, but is not the only user of. I would also say explicitly openqasm v3 because 2.0 and earlier would not be comparable given they didn't support well classical instructions.
Also could mention https://www.sandia.gov/quantum/Projects/QSCOUT.html, and https://arxiv.org/pdf/1808.02449.pdf
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Sorry this is a better link for JAQAL, the IR for the QSCOUT project: https://www.sandia.gov/quantum/Projects/quantum_assembly_spec.pdf
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…uting.md Co-authored-by: Sarah Kaiser <sckaiser@sckaiser.com>
…uting.md Co-authored-by: Sarah Kaiser <sckaiser@sckaiser.com>
…uting.md Co-authored-by: Sarah Kaiser <sckaiser@sckaiser.com>
crazy4pi314
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