In a bid to increase the diversity of quantum languages and toolsets, CQC have announced that they will make their t|ket > language available to programmers and developers on an unrestricted basis in a boost to increase the language diversity in the quantum sector.
Currently researchers and programmers use languages such as Qiskit, Cirq, Q# and PyQuil amongst others. But there are others that have garnered a growing following. As the industry still in its infancy the languages we have grown up with in the fledgling industry may not be the languages and tools we use tomorrow. This author remembers using assembly code to get performance gains, writing many thousands of lines in C and C++. Now much of that functionality can be captured in just a few lines of Python and Julia. Simply looking at the popularity of modern classical languages we can see the evolution to languages that give more bang for the buck and operate on a much higher level. Languages and toolsets such as t|ket > are aiming to make that lower lever stuff less tedious and onerous.
What is t|ket > ?
The t|ket > framework is a software platform for the development and execution of gate-level quantum computation, providing state-of-the-art performance in circuit compilation. The toolset is designed to aid platform-agnostic software and extract the most out of the available NISQ devices of today.
The reason why anyone would use t|ket > is that it can often make more efficient and optimised choices under the hood – just like the everyday compilers we use for languages like C or even Python. The NISQ era of quantum computing means that with scant resources, developers want to make maximal use of whatever machine their circuits run on.
We think that t|ket > is probably the most hardware agnostic toolset out there
Quantum Zeitgeist
The language toolset from CQC named t|ket > can work on a variety of hardware platforms and includes circuit optimisation and routing features that support specific applications.
The language and toolset will be continually updated and enhanced with new versions. Pytket is compatible with python as you’d expect – enabling programs to employ the syntax of python to build quantum circuits. The latest release of t|ket > is 0.7.
The latest version allows developers to swap out quantum hardware backends with relative ease – i.e. a single line change and now has support for Azure Quantum backends. Interstingly as IBM have announced their ability to make mid-circuit measurements pytket has been updated to faciliate this.
If you would like to see the project from CQC, go the t|ket > github project. A number of architectures are currently supported which include circuits from Google Cirq, IBM Qiskit, AQT, Honeywell, Amazon Braket, Microsoft QSharp, Pyzx, ProjectQ, Qulacs, Rigetti pyQuil and IonQ.