Finish qasm split off into separate project

[jwoehr]

Abstract

The Q Team has already decided to split qasm off into its own project.
Help finish that effort.

Description

Under the direction of @1ucian0 (Dr. Bello) I started on this by implementing a functional interface to qasm translation in this pull request.
That stalled on problems with the build conveyor where Windows was bombing on drawing characters in one of my test cases.
Also Dr. Bello wanted to fold the interface into existing code.

Members

• @jwoehr
• Qiskit mentor: @1ucian0

Deliverable

Qasm in its own project

GitHub repo

Qiskit/qiskit-qasm2 ? qiskit-community/qasm2 ?

[1ucian0]

I'm in!

[HuangJunye]

Is this project different from https://github.com/Qiskit/openqasm?

[jwoehr]

I'm not sure how this is going to be handled, @HuangJunye ...
I think OpenQASM will remain integral with the main Qiskit project even if it is moved to its own project outside Terra.
I opened this issue to make people aware there will be this work and there is the possibility to make a contribution in this interesting field.
Especially since hacking on OpenQASM does not require a lot of deep QC knowledge, it's just parser + tree + circuit, a boilerplate sort of programming project.
I even wrote an alternate QASM compiler nuqasm2 last year.

[HuangJunye]

Well most of the projects proposed so far do not require deep QC knowledge. I personally it's really interested in learning "classical" programming in the context of quantum computing :)

nuqasm2 seems really cool. I'll check it out!