Quantum computing is a rapidly growing field with the potential to change how we solve previously intractable problems. Emerging hardware is approaching a complexity that requires increasingly sophisticated programming and control. Scaffold is an older quantum programming language that was originally designed for resource estimation for far-future, large quantum machines, and ScaffCC is the corresponding LLVM-based compiler. For the first time, we provide a full and complete overview of the language itself, the compiler as well as its pass structure. While previous works Abhari et al (2015 Parallel Comput. 45 2–17), Abhari et al (2012 Scaffold: quantum programming language https://cs.princeton.edu/research/techreps/TR-934-12), have piecemeal descriptions of different portions of this toolchain, we provide a more full and complete description in this paper. We also introduce updates to ScaffCC including conditional measurement and multidimensional qubit arrays designed to keep in step with modern quantum assembly languages, as well as an alternate toolchain targeted at maintaining correctness and low resource count for noisy-intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) machines, and compatibility with current versions of LLVM and Clang. Our goal is to provide the research community with a functional LLVM framework for quantum program analysis, optimization, and generation of executable code.

量子计算是一个快速发展的领域，有可能改变我们解决以前难以解决的问题的方式。新兴硬件越来越复杂，需要越来越复杂的编程和控制。Scaffold 是一种较旧的量子编程语言，最初是为远未来的大型量子机器的资源估计而设计的，而 ScaffCC 是相应的基于 LLVM 的编译器。我们第一次提供语言本身、编译器及其传递结构的完整概述。虽然之前的工作是 Abhari等人(2015 Parallel Comput. 45 2–17)，但 Abhari等人（2012 Scaffold：quantum programming language https://cs.princeton.edu/research/techreps/TR-934-12），对该工具链的不同部分进行了零碎的描述，我们在本文中提供了更完整和完整的描述。我们还介绍了 ScaffCC 的更新，包括旨在与现代量子汇编语言保持同步的条件测量和多维量子位阵列，以及旨在保持噪声中等规模量子 (NISQ) 机器的正确性和低资源数量的替代工具链，以及与当前版本的 LLVM 和 Clang 兼容。我们的目标是为研究社区提供用于量子程序分析、优化和生成可执行代码的功能性 LLVM 框架。