Q sharp is a domain-specific programming language used for expressing quantum algorithms. It was initially released to the public by Microsoft as part of the Quantum Development Kit
Historically, Microsoft Research had two teams interested in quantum computing, the QuArC team based in Redmond, directed by Krysta Svore, that explored the construction of quantum circuitry, and Station Q initially located in Santa Barbara and directed by Michael Freedman, that explored topological quantum computing.
During a Microsoft Ignite Keynote on September 26, 2017, Microsoft announced that they were going to release a new programming language geared specifically towards quantum computers. On December 11, 2017, Microsoft released Q# as a part of the Quantum Development Kit.
At Build 2019, Microsoft announced that it is open-sourcing the Quantum Development Kit, including its Q# compilers and simulators.
Bettina Heim currently leads the Q# language development effort.
Q# is available as a separately downloaded extension for Visual Studio,[7] but it can also be run as an independent tool from the Command line 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.
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: Microsoft Developer Network: Q#. 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: Microsoft Q# Coding Contest - Codeforces, 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: microsoft/QuantumKatas with links to resources, and answers to the problems.
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