Advantages of two quantum programming platforms in quantum computing and quantum chemistry

Abstract

Quantum computing is at the forefront of technological advancement and has the potential to revolutionize various fields, including quantum chemistry. Choosing an appropriate quantum programming language becomes critical as quantum education and research increase. In this paper, we comprehensively compare two leading quantum programming languages, Qiskit and PennyLane, focusing on their suitability for teaching and research. We delve into their basic and advanced usage, examine their learning curves, and evaluate their capabilities in quantum computing experiments. We also demonstrate using a quantum programming language to build a half adder and a machine learning model. Our study reveals that each language has distinct advantages. While PennyLane excels in research applications due to its flexibility to adjust parameters in detail and access multiple sources of real quantum devices, Qiskit stands out in education because of its web-based graphical user interface and smaller code size. The codes and the dataset used in the studies are available at https://github.com/wangpeihua1231/quantum-programming-platform.