Microsoft has been open sourcing a lot of its in-house technologies in recent years, from dev tools to its ChakraCore javascript engine, and more recently the Windows Calculator app. This week, the company announced that it was open-sourcing its Quantum Development Kit, hoping to help advancing research in quantum computing.
We've made it easier than ever to contribute to our #Quantum initiatives by open-sourcing the Quantum Development Kit in GitHub. Read more and begin engaging with our growing, passionate community of Q# users: https://t.co/7puLzDK0hz pic.twitter.com/AAFPW4rvlz
— Azure Quantum (@MSFTQuantum) July 11, 2019
“We are open-sourcing the QDK so that our broader community can contribute quantum apps and algorithms as well as advancements in compilation, optimization and tooling,” the Microsoft Quantum Team explained. “By open-sourcing the Quantum Development Kit in GitHub, we enable developers to contribute alongside an emerging community of quantum computing programmers to help solve some of our world’s most important challenges.”
The Microsoft Quantum Development Kit was released over two years ago and includes the Q# Quantum programming lounge, development environment extensions for Visual Studio, and much more. Quantum computing, which differs from classical computing by its use of Quantum bits (or qubits), can perform complex computations much more efficiently. It’s still very early days for quantum computers, but Microsoft just made a significant contribution to the growing quantum community, and you can access the company’s Quantum Development Kit on this page.
