Of-the-shelf Components for Quantum
Programming and Testing
Cláudio Gomes
a
, Daniel Fortunato
c
, João Paulo Fernandes
a
and Rui Abreu
b
a
CISUC — Departamento de Engenharia Informática da Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal
b
Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, Portugal
c
Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon, Portugal
Abstract
In this position paper, we argue that readily available components are much needed as central contribu-
tions towards not only enlarging the community of quantum computer programmers, but also in order
to increase their efciency and efectiveness. We describe the work we intend to do towards providing
such components, namely by developing and making available libraries of quantum algorithms and
data structures, and libraries for testing quantum programs. We fnally argue that Quantum Computer
Programming is such an efervescent area that synchronization eforts and combined strategies within
the community are demanded to shorten the time frame until quantum advantage is observed and can
be explored in practice.
Keywords
Quantum Computing, Sofware Engineering, Reusable Components
1. Introduction
There is a large body of compelling evidence that Computation as we have known and used for
decades is under challenge. As new models for computation emerge, its limits are being pushed
beyond what pragmatically had been seen in practice. In this line, Quantum Computing (QC) has
received renewed worldwide attention. Having its foundations been thoroughly studied, mainly
from the point of view of its physical implementation, their potential has, even if preliminarily,
is currently being witnessed.
A quantum computer can potentially solve various problems that a classical computer cannot
solve efciently; this is known as Quantum Supremacy. Examples include scalable simulations
of quantum systems in physics, efcient modelling of chemical reactions, and fast breaking of
encryption codes in cryptography.
In an article published in Nature in October 2019, Google describes how using a self-built
54-qubit processor correctly executed, in only 200 seconds, a benchmark that even the world’s
Q-SET’20: 1st Quantum Sofware Engineering and Technology Workshop, October 13, 2020, Denver — Broomfeld,
Colorado, USA
email: gomes@student.dei.uc.pt (C. Gomes); daniel.b.fortunato@tecnico.ulisboa.pt (D. Fortunato); jpf@dei.uc.pt
(J.P. Fernandes); rui@computer.org (R. Abreu)
url: http://dei.uc.pt/~jpf (J.P. Fernandes); https://ruimaranhao.com/ (R. Abreu)
orcid: 0000-0002-1952-9460 (J.P. Fernandes); 0000-0003-3734-3157 (R. Abreu)
© 2020 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
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