arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Craig Roy.
Linear types enforce no-cloning and no-deleting theorems in functional quantum programming. However, in imperative quantum programming, they have not gained widespread adoption. This work aims to develop a quantum type system that combines ergonomic linear typing with imperative semantics and maintains safety guarantees. All ideas presented here have been implemented in Quantinuum's Guppy programming language.
We introduce the Hierarchical Unified Graph Representation (HUGR): a novel graph based intermediate representation for mixed quantum-classical programs. HUGR's design features high expressivity and extensibility to capture the capabilities of near-term and forthcoming quantum computing devices, as well as new and evolving abstractions from novel quantum programming paradigms. The graph based structure is machine-friendly and supports powerful pattern matching based compilation techniques. Inspired by MLIR, HUGR's extensibility further allows compilation tooling to reason about programs at multiple levels of abstraction, lowering smoothly between them. Safety guarantees in the structure including strict, static typing and linear quantum types allow rapid development of compilation tooling without fear of program invalidation. A full specification of HUGR and reference implementation are open-source and available online.