A Brief Survey of Quantum Programming Languages

Peter Selinger

Roland Rüdiger

The present article gives an introductory overview of the novel field of quantum programming languages (QPLs) from a pragmatic perspective. First, after a short summary of basic notations of quantum mechanics, some of the goals and design issues are surveyed, which motivate the research in this area. Then, several of the approaches are described in more detail. The article concludes with a brief survey of current research activities and a tabular summary of a selection of QPLs, which have been published so far.

Ellie D’Hondt

Yongshan Ding, Frederic T. Chong

Quan Do, Hersh Gupta, Xiyuan Cao +5 more

Quantum computing has seen multiple recent breakthroughs and is getting closer to demonstrations of an exponential advantage over classical computing for certain problems. Programmers will require high-level, general-purpose, executable programming languages to express quantum solutions clearly and effectively, and the field has already produced a wide variety of such languages. This paper presents a language classification framework and uses it to survey ten popular quantum programming languages. The findings include conceptual and experimental comparisons that result in a list of challenges for future language design.

Simon J. Gay

The field of quantum programming languages is developing rapidly and there is a surprisingly large literature. Research in this area includes the design of programming languages for quantum computing, the application of established semantic and logical techniques to the foundations of quantum mechanics, and the design of compilers for quantum programming languages. This article justifies the study of quantum programming languages, presents the basics of quantum computing, surveys the literature in quantum programming languages, and indicates directions for future research.