Sized types for low-level quantum metaprogramming

Abstract

One of the most fundamental aspects of quantum circuit design is the concept of families of circuits parametrized by an instance size. As in classical programming, metaprogramming allows the programmer to write entire families of circuits simultaneously, an ability which is of particular importance in the context of quantum computing as algorithms frequently use arithmetic over non-standard word lengths. In this work, we introduce metaQASM, a typed extension of the openQASM language supporting the metaprogramming of circuit families. Our language and type system, built around a lightweight implementation of sized types, supports subtyping over register sizes and is moreover type-safe. In particular, we prove that our system is strongly normalizing, and as such any well-typed metaQASM program can be statically unrolled into a finite circuit.