Microsoft just announced the first major update to Quantum Development Kit (QDK). It debuted at Ignite 2017 and ushered in its first public preview in December last year. The biggest change this update is to support the development of Linux and macOS platforms using Q #. Developers can build their applications with quantum simulation support in Visual Studio Code. Microsoft said this is one of the features most people are interested in previewing.
- Support for Mac- and Linux-based development. This has been our #1 requested feature from developers, and we’re thrilled to deliver support for building Q# quantum applications on macOS and Linux, including integration with VS Code and quantum simulation support.
- Full open source license for our quantum development libraries and samples. In December, we shared the source code for our libraries to help developers understand how Q# constructs work. Many developers wanted to do more than just learn with that code; they wanted to re-use it in their own applications and contribute their own enhancements back to the Q# community. We think that’s a great idea, so we’ve open-sourced the libraries here.
- Interoperability with the Python programming language. Many developers have existing libraries of code in Python so we wanted to give them easy access to that functionality from Q# without having to port anything. Available as a preview on Windows today, Python interoperability allows Q# code to call Python routines directly, and vice-versa.
- Faster simulator performance. We’ve increased our quantum simulator performance by up to 4-5x, giving you a much faster testing and optimization loop, especially on simulations involving 20 or more qubits.
Of course, Microsoft is still in its infancy in quantum computing, so stay tuned for this year’s Developer Conference 2018.
