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Comment by vtomole | Hacker News Reader

Nice to see Microsoft's progress in quantum computing. It seems like you can't use this SDK without Visual Studio. If you don't have Visual Studio, you can use LIQUi|> [0]; another quantum SDK from Microsoft.

[0]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/language-in...

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Or you can get Visual Studio Community for free: https://www.visualstudio.com/downloads/

Well, if you don't have Windows, that still doesn't help. And if you don't //want// Windows or Visual Studio, that doesn't help either ;-)

I didn't know that you can use Visual Studio on anything that is not Windows. I'll try to install it.

Edit: Looks like you need Visual Studio Community for this SDK which Microsoft only has a Windows version.

Looks like it's available for Mac as well: https://www.visualstudio.com/thank-you-downloading-visual-st...

Edit: The QDK does not have Mac support yet.

"Visual Studio for Mac" is just a rebrand of another IDE they purchased this past year, it's not feature-equivalent with the real VS AFAIK.

Hi, I'm one of the devs on Q#! We're excited to make this preview release of Microsoft's Quantum Development Kit available on Windows PCs. We're exploring the possibility of supporting other platforms in the future and will share more about this at a later time.

"LIQUi|>" is hands-down the worst name for anything I've ever seen. Do they really expect people to write it like that?

The "|>" is an allusion to the bar and angle brackets used in bra-ket notation [0]. I believe LIQUi|> is targeted more toward academic quantum computing researchers, who are likely to recognize/appreciate the reference.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bra%E2%80%93ket_notation

I will be honest and say I didn't get the reference!

Don't worry! I study quantum computation, and I didn't notice that the |> was supposed to be a D to form the word LIQUID!

It looks horrible but on the other hand it will be really easy to google.

Also, it is an injoke for people familiar with quantum mechanics.

> it will be really easy to google

Hopefully :)

Sometimes it gets spelled as LIQ𝑈𝑖⏐〉 (http://stationq.github.io/Liquid/) which is different from LIQUi|> (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/language-in...), which is different from LIQUID. It all depends on how Google feels about qubits on any given day.

But can you spell it all three ways at the same time?

The exact answer would take more time than I have, so I'll say maybe.

Hi, I'm a dev on Q#, and wanted to help clarify a bit how the Quantum Development Kit relates to LIQUi|〉. Microsoft's Quantum Development Kit is a successor to LIQUi|⟩ and we're excited for you to download it and begin writing Q# code. LIQUi|⟩ is focused on the efficient simulation of a quantum computer on a classical one. Q# is a language that will let you program actual quantum computers (in the future). As such, there are areas where LIQUi|⟩ can currently out-perform Q# when it is used on one of the provided simulators (which are striving to emulate the actual gates on quantum hardware). Over time, more simulators will be provided for Q# that will meet (and exceed) the efficiency of LIQUi|⟩ and at that point, we will fully retire LIQUi|⟩.

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