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Quantum programming

Computer programming for quantum computers

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  • 3 chapters

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When working with quantum processor-based systems, quantum programming languages provide high-level abstractions to express quantum algorithms efficiently. These languages often integrate with classical programming environments and support hybrid quantum-classical workflows. The development of quantum software has been strongly influenced by the open-source community, with many toolkits and frameworks—such as Qrisp, Qiskit, Cirq, PennyLane, and qBraid SDK—available under open licenses.

Quantum programming can also be used to model or control experimental systems through quantum instrumentation and sensor-based platforms. While some quantum computing architectures—such as linear optical quantum computing using the KLM protocol—require specialized hardware, others use gate-based quantum processors accessible through software interfaces. In both cases, quantum programming serves as the bridge between theoretical algorithms and physical implementation.

Quantum instruction sets

Quantum instruction sets are used to turn higher level algorithms into physical instructions that can be executed on quantum processors. Sometimes these instructions are specific to a given hardware platform, e.g. ion traps or superconducting qubits.

Blackbird

Blackbird is a quantum instruction set and intermediate representation used by Xanadu Quantum Technologies and Strawberry Fields. It is designed to represent continuous-variable quantum programs that can run on photonic quantum hardware.

cQASM

cQASM, also known as common QASM, is a hardware-agnostic quantum assembly language which guarantees the interoperability between all the quantum compilation and simulation tools. It was introduced by the QCA Lab at TUDelft.

OpenQASM

OpenQASM is the intermediate representation introduced by IBM for use with Qiskit and the IBM Quantum Platform.

QIR

Quantum Intermediate Representation (QIR) is a hardware-agnostic intermediate representation developed by Microsoft as part of the Quantum Development Kit. It is based on the LLVM compiler infrastructure and is designed to represent quantum programs in a way that supports optimization and execution across diverse quantum hardware backends. QIR serves as a common target for quantum compilers, enabling interoperation between different programming languages, such as Q#, and low-level hardware control layers. It is maintained by the QIR Alliance, a collaborative group of academic and industry partners.

Quil

Quil is an instruction set architecture for quantum computing that first introduced a shared quantum/classical memory model. It was introduced by Robert Smith, Michael Curtis, and William Zeng in A Practical Quantum Instruction Set Architecture. Many quantum algorithms (including quantum teleportation, quantum error correction, simulation, and optimization algorithms) require a shared memory architecture.

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