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A Survey of Quantum Programming Languages
Quan Do, Hersh Gupta, Xiyuan Cao, Aarav Pabla, Pranav Singamsetty, Evan O'Grady, Keli Huang, Jens Palsberg·June 24, 2026
Quantum Physicscs.PL
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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.