Welcome to the Microsoft Quantum Development Kit!

This repository contains tooling for the Q# language, specifically:

• compiler: core compiler logic and command-line tooling
• fuzz: fuzz testing infrastructure
• jupyterlab: JupyterLab extension
• language_service: Q# language service and editor features
• library: Q# standard library
• npm: Q# npm package
• playground: simple website for interacting with Q#
• qdk_package: The qdk Python package (core Q# Python API with native Rust extension)
• resource_estimator: Implementation for the Microsoft Quantum Resource Estimator
• vscode: Visual Studio Code extension
• wasm: The bindings and logic for the WebAssembly module
• widgets: The Q# Jupyter widgets Python package

There are also the tutorials and samples in the ./katas and ./samples directories, respectively.

Code from this repository powers the Q# development experience on https://quantum.microsoft.com.

To build this repository there are dependencies that need to be installed. These are:

• Python (https://python.org)
• Rust (https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install)
  • On all platforms, the wasm32-unknown-unknown must be installed to build the WASM based components

    rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown

  • On MacOS, ensure that both aarch64 and x86_64 targets are installed or you will encounter linking errors.

    rustup target add x86_64-apple-darwin
    rustup target add aarch64-apple-darwin

• Node.js (https://nodejs.org/)
• A C compiler
• wasm-bindgen (see https://github.com/rustwasm/wasm-bindgen)
• wasm-opt (see https://github.com/WebAssembly/binaryen)

The last two can be installed into your HOME directory by running python ./prereqs.py --install

The build script will check these dependencies and their versions and fail if not met. (Or run python ./prereqs.py directly to check if the minimum required versions are installed).

To build, in the root directory run python ./build.py. By default this will run a release build of each project, including running tests and checks such as linting. Run with the --help option for detailed usage.

The playground is a small website that loads the Q# editor, compiler, samples, and documentation for the standard library. It's a way to manually validate any changes you make to these components.

To see instructions for building the playground, refer to Building the Playground Locally.

When building the Python packages (qdk and jupyterlab), if the build script does not detect a current Python virtual environment, it will automatically create one under source/qdk_package/.venv or source/jupyterlab/.venv. When developing locally, you can use these virtual environments to run the tests by running source .venv/bin/activate (Linux/MacOS) or .venv/Scripts/activate.bat (Windows).

The easiest way to develop in this repo is to use VS Code. When you open the project root, by default VS Code will recommend you install the extensions listed in .vscode/extensions.json. These extensions provide language services for editing, as well as linters and formatters to ensure the code meets the requirements (which are checked by the build.py script and CI).

Some settings are recommended (but not enforced) to make development easier. These are in the .vscode/*.shared.json files. If the Workspace Config+ extension is installed, this will automatically apply these settings, as well as overrides from your own corresponding .vscode/*.local.json settings. If you don't install this extension, you can use these as a reference for editing your own .vscode/*.json settings files. (See the extension home page for more details).

Debugging the VS Code extension is best done inside VS Code by launching with F5 (or Run / Start Debugging from the VS Code menu). The launch.shared.json file will be applied if using the Workspace Config+ extension outlined above, and this includes a command-line flag to launch the development instance with a profile named dev. (If not familiar with VS Code profiles see https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/configure/profiles).

This allows you to develop in the main VS Code instance with all your regular extensions enabled (including the QDK), but use a dev profile that only includes the minimal extensions for testing (e.g. GitHub Copilot, Python, Jupyter). This avoids the issue where launching with all extensions disabled stops you from testing Copilot, Python, etc., but launching with your default extensions enabled will cause conflicts with the installed QDK and the one being debugged.

By default the debugger will launch a VS Code instance with the ./samples directory open in the workspace. The directory samples/scratch is excluded from the repo via .gitignore, so you can work on temporary files in this directory without them cluttering your git diff or accidentally checking them in.

If you use Q#, Microsoft Quantum Development Kit, or Microsoft Quantum Resource Estimator, please cite as follows:

• Microsoft Quantum Development Kit:

@software{Microsoft_Quantum_Development_Kit,
   author = {{Microsoft}},
   license = {MIT},
   title = {{Microsoft Quantum Development Kit}},
   url = {https://github.com/microsoft/qdk} }

• Q# programming language:

@inproceedings{Svore_2018, series={RWDSL2018},
   title={{Q\#: Enabling Scalable Quantum Computing and Development with a High-level DSL}},
   url={http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3183895.3183901},
   DOI={10.1145/3183895.3183901},
   booktitle={Proceedings of the Real World Domain Specific Languages Workshop 2018},
   publisher={ACM},
   author={Svore, Krysta and Geller, Alan and Troyer, Matthias and Azariah, John and Granade, Christopher and Heim, Bettina and Kliuchnikov, Vadym and Mykhailova, Mariia and Paz, Andres and Roetteler, Martin},
   year={2018},
   month=feb, collection={RWDSL2018} }

• Microsoft Quantum Resource Estimator:

@inproceedings{Microsoft_Quantum_Resource_Estimator,
   author = {van Dam, Wim and Mykhailova, Mariia and Soeken, Mathias},
   title = {{Using Azure Quantum Resource Estimator for Assessing Performance of Fault Tolerant Quantum Computation}},
   year = {2023},
   isbn = {9798400707858},
   publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
   address = {New York, NY, USA},
   url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3624062.3624211},
   doi = {10.1145/3624062.3624211},
   booktitle = {Proceedings of the SC '23 Workshops of The International Conference on High Performance Computing, Network, Storage, and Analysis},
   pages = {1414–1419},
   numpages = {6},
   series = {SC-W '23} }

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For more details, please see CONTRIBUTING.md.

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