A Survey of Quantum Programming Languages

2026-06-24

AI Summary

This work addresses the absence of a systematic framework for classifying and comparing quantum programming languages, a gap that has hindered the evolution of language design in this domain. The authors propose a unified, multidimensional taxonomy and conduct a comprehensive evaluation—combining qualitative and quantitative analyses—of ten mainstream quantum programming languages across critical dimensions such as expressiveness, executability, and suitability for specific application scenarios. By establishing the first structured comparative framework, this study not only clarifies the relative strengths and weaknesses of existing languages but also systematically identifies core challenges related to readability, generality, and toolchain support. These insights provide both theoretical grounding and practical guidance for the future development of quantum programming languages.

Abstract

Quantum computing has seen multiple recent breakthroughs and is getting closer to demonstrations of an exponential advantage over classical computing for certain problems. Programmers will require high-level, general-purpose, executable programming languages to express quantum solutions clearly and effectively, and the field has already produced a wide variety of such languages. This paper presents a language classification framework and uses it to survey ten popular quantum programming languages. The findings include conceptual and experimental comparisons that result in a list of challenges for future language design.

Problem

• quantum programming languages
• language classification
• quantum computing
• programming language design
• quantum advantage

Innovation

• quantum programming languages
• language classification framework
• comparative analysis
• quantum computing
• language design challenges