1. History

2. Usage

3. Features

4. Documentation and Resources

5. Syntax
     Similarities with C#    Similarities with F#    Differences  

6. References

7. External links

History

During a Microsoft Ignite Keynote on {{formatDate|2017-09-26|mdy}}, Microsoft announced that they were going to release a new programming language geared specifically towards quantum computers.^[3] On {{formatDate|2017-12-11|mdy}}, Microsoft released Q# as a part of the Quantum Development Kit.^[2]

Usage

Q# is available as a separately downloaded extension for Visual Studio,^[4] but it can also be run as an independent tool from the Command line and/or Visual Studio Code. The Quantum Development Kit ships with a quantum simulator which is capable of running Q#.

In order to invoke the quantum simulator, another .NET programming language, usually C#, is used, which provides the (classical) input data for the simulator and reads the (classical) output data from the simulator.

Features

A primary feature of Q# is the ability to create and use qubits for algorithms. As a consequence, some of the most prominent features of Q# are the ability to entangle and introduce superpositioning to qubits via Controlled NOT gates and Hadamard gates, respectively, as well as Toffoli Gates, Pauli X, Y, Z Gate, and many more which are used for a variety of operations; see the list at the article on quantum logic gates.

The hardware stack that will eventually come together with Q# is expected to implement Qubits as topological qubits. The quantum simulator that is shipped with the Quantum Development Kit today is capable of processing up to 32 qubits on a user machine and up to 40 qubits on Azure.

Documentation and Resources

Currently, the resources available for Q# are scarce, but the official documentation is published: [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/quantum/?view=qsharp-preview Microsoft Developer Network: Q#]. [https://github.com/Microsoft/Quantum/ Microsoft Quantum Github repository] is also a large collection of sample programs implementing a variety of Quantum algorithms and their tests.

Microsoft has also hosted a Quantum Coding contest on Codeforces here: http://codeforces.com/msqs2018, and also provided related material to help answer the questions in the blog posts, plus the detailed solutions in the tutorials.

Microsoft hosts a set of learning exercises to help learn Q# on github: https://github.com/Microsoft/QuantumKatas with links to resources, and answers to the problems.

Syntax

Q# is syntactically related to both C# and F# yet also has some significant differences.

Similarities with C#

• Uses {{Code|namespace}} for code isolation
• All statements end with a {{Code|;}}
• Curly braces are used for statements of scope
• Single line comments are done using {{Code|//}}
• Variable data types such as {{Code|Int}} {{Code|Double}} {{Code|String}} and {{Code|Bool}} are similar, although capitalised (and Int is 64-bit)^[5]
• Qubits are allocated and disposed inside a {{Code|using}} block.
• Lambda functions using the => operator.
• Results are returned using the {{Code|return}} keyword.

Similarities with F#

• Variables are declared using either {{Code|let}} or {{Code|mutable}}^[1]
• First-order functions
• Modules, which are imported using the {{Code|open}} keyword
• The datatype is declared after the variable name
• The range operator {{Code|..}}
• {{Code|for … in}} loops
• Every operation/function has a return value, rather than {{Code|void}}. Instead of {{Code|void}}, an empty Tuple {{Code|()}} is returned.
• Definition of record datatypes (using the {{Code|newtype}} keyword, instead of {{Code|type}}).

Differences

• Functions are declared using the {{Code|function}} keyword
• Operations on the quantum computer are declared using the {{Code|operation}} keyword
• Lack of multiline comments
• Asserts instead of throwing exceptions
• Documentation is written in Markdown instead of XML-based documentation tags

References

External links

• [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/quantum/quantum-qr-intro?view=qsharp-preview Official documentation]

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