QWIRE in nLab

emphasis on formal software verification:

[p. iv:] “We argue that quantum programs demand machine-checkable proofs of correctness. We justify this on the basis of the complexity of programs manipulating quantum states, the expense of running quantum programs, and the inapplicability of traditional debugging techniques to programs whose states cannot be examined.”

[p. 3:] “Quantum programs are tremendously difficult to understand and implement, almost guaranteeing that they will have bugs. And traditional approaches to debugging will not help us: We cannot set breakpoints and look at our qubits without collapsing the quantum state. Even techniques like unit tests and random testing will be impossible to run on classical machines and too expensive to run on quantum computers – and failed tests are unlikely to be informative”

[p. 4:] “Thesis Statement: Quantum programming is not only amenable to formal verification: it demands it.”

“The overarching goal of this thesis is to write and verify quantum programs together. Towards that end, we introduce a quantum programming language called Qwire and embed it inside the Coq proof assistant. We give it a linear type system to ensure that it obeys the laws of quantum mechanics and a denotational semantics to prove that programs behave as desired.”