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Cambridge University Press eBooks

Quantum Languages, Compilers, and Tools

Robert Hundt

Published Nov 20, 2025• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We have introduced a compact infrastructure for exploration and experimentation, but all at the level of individual gates. Higher levels of abstraction are needed to scale to larger programs. The chapter discusses several quantum programming languages, including their specific tooling, such as hierarchical program representations or entanglement analysis. General challenges for compilation are discussed as well as compiler optimization techniques.

DOI
10.1017/9781009548519.017

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Cambridge University Press eBooks•Nov 20, 2025•0 citations
We have introduced a compact infrastructure for exploration and experimentation, but all at the level of individual gates. Higher levels of abstraction are needed to scale to larger programs. The chapter discusses several quantum programming languages, including their specific tooling, such as hierarchical program representations or entanglement analysis. General challenges for compilation are discussed as well as compiler optimization techniques.
At this point, we understand the principles of quantum computing, the important foundational algorithms, and the basics of quantum error correction. We have developed a compact infrastructure for exploration and experimentation, but it is at the gate level. Higher levels of abstraction are needed to scale to much larger programs. The chapter discusses several quantum programming languages, including their specific tooling, such as hierarchical program representations or entanglement analysis. General challenges for compilation are discussed, as well as compiler optimization techniques. The chapter finishes with transpilation, a powerful compilation-based technique. It allows seamless porting of circuits to other frameworks, enabling the use of their advanced error models or distributed simulation capabilities. The underlying (simple) compiler technology would further enable implementation of several of the features found in programming languages, such as automatic uncomputation, entanglement analysis, and conditional blocks.
Programming language constructs generally operate on data words, and so does most compiler analysis and transformation. However, individual word-level operations often harbor pointless, yet resource and power hungry, lower-level operations. By transforming complete programs into gate-level operations on individual bits, and optimizing operations at that level, it is possible to dramatically reduce the total amount of work needed to execute the program's algorithm. This gate-level representation can be in terms of any complete set of logic gate types; earlier work targeted conventional multiplexor gates, but the work reported here centers on targeting CSWAP (FredKin) gates without fanout - a form that can be implemented on a quantum computer. This paper will overview the approach, describe the current state of the prototype compiler, and suggest some ways in which compiler automatic parallelization technology might be extended to allow ordinary programs to take advantage of the unique properties of quantum computers.
Abstract Quantum computers promise to transform our notions of computation by offering a completely new paradigm. To achieve scalable quantum computation, optimizing compilers and a corresponding software design flow will be essential. We present a software architecture for compiling quantum programs from a high-level language program to hardware-specific instructions. We describe the necessary layers of abstraction and their differences and similarities to classical layers of a computer-aided design flow. For each layer of the stack, we discuss the underlying methods for compilation and optimization. Our software methodology facilitates more rapid innovation among quantum algorithm designers, quantum hardware engineers, and experimentalists. It enables scalable compilation of complex quantum algorithms and can be targeted to any specific quantum hardware implementation.
Compilers and computer-aided design tools will be essential for quantum computing. We present a computer-aided design flow that transforms a highlevel language program representing a quantum computing algorithm into a technology-specific implementation. We trace the significant steps in this flow and illustrate the transformations to the representation of the quantum program. The focus of this paper is on the languages and transformations needed to represent and optimize a quantum algorithm along the design flow.
The work aims to enable the use of common software engineering techniques and tools for quantum programming languages (e.g., OpenQASM). With the increased interest in quantum computing, researchers are adopting the use of higher-level quantum programming languages versus low-level circuit diagrams. While general purpose programming languages (e.g., C++, Python) are highly supported by a variety of software engineering tools, these novel programming languages for quantum computing have almost no support. Useable tools for debugging, static analysis, error detection, and transformation are currently non-existent. This work extends an existing software infrastructure (i.e., srcML) for the analysis, exploration, and manipulation of source code to OpenQASM. The srcML infrastructure, via parsing, generates abstract syntax information of programs to support high-level querying and analysis of the source code. With this, quantum developers can extract information and identify possible errors or inefficiencies in their programs. The paper presents the basic syntactic markup for OpenQASM. Also, a number of relevant quantum-based problems (e.g., iteration patterns, control recursion) are described and examples of how they are addressed using srcML are given.