December 23rd, 2019

Festivus: Q# Feats of Strength

Mariia Mykhailova
Principal Software Engineer

Last year we celebrated Festivus by observing Airing of Grievances – the UserVoice channel where Q# users filed bug reports and improvement suggestions. It seems fitting to observe Feats of Strength this year. Alas, we couldn’t take the same approach as last year:

  • First, we open-sourced the QDK and deprecated the UserVoice channel, so there is no single channel for QDK feedback any longer.
  • Second, our users don’t typically open GitHub issues just to thank the language creators for an especially nice feature!

Instead, we decided to poll our team members for their favorite Q# feature or a particularly useful tool. Check out their replies below – you might find something new to try!

  • The partial application syntax to create closures is actually quite nifty and very useful… Here is an example. – Alan Geller
  • The functor support is very straightforward and easy to use. Just put Adjoint in front of an adjointable operation and [the compiler] figures it out. – Scott Carda
  • And that we support borrowing is neat too, for the more quantum savvy people. – Bettina Heim
  • I would highlight that qubit management happens automatically in a well structured context. – Andres Paz
  • apply … within and AssertProb. – Vadym Kliuchnikov
  • QDK is open source! Plus first-class functions and operations + partial application lets you do just about everything. – Chris Granade
  • Tools for testing and debugging and Jupyter Notebooks support: the first feature to make the Quantum Katas possible and the second one to make them beautiful! – Mariia Mykhailova
  • It is hard to pick just one thing…

    Martin Roetteler

How about you – what is your favorite Q# feature?

Category
Q# Language

Author

Mariia Mykhailova
Principal Software Engineer

Mariia Mykhailova is a principal software engineer at the Advanced Quantum Development team at Microsoft. She works on developing software for fault-tolerant quantum computation. Mariia is also a part-time lecturer at Northeastern University, teaching Introduction to Quantum Computing since 2020, and the author of O’Reilly book “Q# Pocket Guide”. In her spare time, she writes problems for programming competitions and creates puzzles.

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