LaurentAjdnik
commented
2 years ago Hi @bettinaheim!
there also exist tools that create an AST for a Python program
Using the built-in ast Python library probably is the way to go. Here's a nice tutorial.
From here, any Python source file can be converted into LLVM IR, with a little bit (= a ton) of work. PyLLVM attempted to do this: "A compiler from a subset of Python to LLVM-IR".
invoke the pyqir_generator on each node to emit QIR compile parts of Python itself to QIR
The current mock language specializes in quantum circuit description, which makes it ready for conversion into QIR through pygir-generator.
Do we agree that our Python sample should mostly be code for generating a circuit, with no other complex Python code around?
For instance a few lines of Qiskit that would be parsed through the ast library and sent to pyqir-generator for QIR output (hence not using the Qiskit library itself at all)?
bettinaheim
Filing an issue to capture a question/request that has come up in discussions:
This repo currently contains an example that shows how to use the pyqir_generator to generate QIR for a mock language. Conceptually, a program is written in a language, the language specific compiler is then used to create the AST representing that program, and usually tools for traversing that AST (and AST walker) and perform custom logic on each AST node are available as part of the compiler infrastructure. The idea is then to use such a walker to invoke the pyqir_generator on each node to emit QIR representing the program. While this is shown for a custom language in one of the examples, there also exist tools that create an AST for a Python program. The request hence was to add an example to show how such a tool could be used to compile parts of Python itself to QIR.