Towards Higher Abstraction Levels in Quantum Computing

This work is a survey and a position paper towards a higher abstraction in quantum computing (QC) programming frameworks and software development kits (SDKs). Since in 2003, Peter Shor complained about the limited increase in the number of QC algorithms [19], we see an urgent need to bridge the gap between well-established classical physics and quantum physics so that approaches become more intuitive, and - hopefully - more quantum algorithms can be discovered. In service-based hybrid QC frameworks, where algorithms need to be partitioned into quantum and classical tasks, we look at the methods available and the abstractions used. For this paper we have investigated the various levels of abstraction in Silq, Qrisp, OpenQl, Qiskit, Cirq, IonQ, and Ocean, which are originated in the QC domain, as well as CUDA Quantum, rooted in the classical software domain. With the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs), we have also explored the capabilities of LLM-powered tools like GitHub Copilot, which currently represents the top level of abstraction.