Jeff is a structured, extensible, and simple interchange format for quantum compilers. Designed to foster collaboration and accelerate research by providing a common language for compilers to communicate.
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Structured representation: First class support for hybrid, structured, and dynamic quantum programs. Share the logical intent of a program, not just a low-level gate sequence.
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Efficient: Jeff is built to be a high-performant, compact, in-memory representation, making it fast and easy for compilers to load, transform, and export.
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Extensible by design: The Jeff schema is designed to allow maximum extensibility --- it can be easily extended with new features or metadata, ensuring it can grow with the field.
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Bring your own compiler framework: Jeff provides a neutral ground for different quantum compilers (such as Catalyst, TKET, UCC, and others) to share passes, interoperate seamlessly on a single workflow.
The quantum software field is at a critical juncture — as quantum algorithms become increasingly sophisticated, quantum program representation is evolving from low-level, gate-centric approaches to more complex representations that incorporate classical processing, structure, and dynamism.
In particular,
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There are some algorithmic patterns we cannot represent without structure and dynamism (for example, repeat-until-success and quantum error correction).
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Algorithms inherently contain structure — by preserving this structure during optimization, we can massively improve scalability.
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Thinking beyond simple circuits will allow us to do new things and progress the field.
As we increasingly represent program structure in our quantum algorithms and programs, we need to move beyond the circuit picture.
Compilation and optimization of such programs is crucial to support quantum hardware execution, however current de-facto interchange formats (such as QIR and OpenQASM) either lack the explicit structure needed for advanced high-level quantum optimizations, or are not tool-agnostic, locking developers into particular toolchains like LLVM.
This creates a bottleneck for collaboration and makes it difficult to develop and share sophisticated compiler passes.
Unlike other common quantum program formats, Jeff is not a human-readable source language or a low-level intermediate representation. It's an in-memory and serialized representation designed for high-performance compiler tools.
Finally, the quantum software, compilation, and hardware development is evolving rapidly, and there is still a lot of uncertainty. We don't want to slow down discovery! Jeff will be developed here, on GitHub, and guided by the needs of quantum software and compilation.
For more details, please see Motivation and FAQs.
The serialization schema is defined using the
Cap'n Proto serialization protocol. The current version
is defined in impl/capnp/jeff.capnp.
We provide implementations in various languages for reading and writing jeff programs:
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jeff-formatlibrary on crates.io - 🐍
jeff-formatlibrary on pypi - C++ headers available in
impl/cpp
Jeff is hosted by the Unitary Foundation and is a collaboration between developers at Quantinuum and Xanadu.
Your contributions help improve the tool for everyone! There are many ways you can contribute, such as:
- Opening issues to share bugs or request features.
- Taking part in the development discussion and helping us shape the roadmap of Jeff.
- Integrating Jeff with quantum compilers.
- Helping us build up a library of interoperable next-gen compiler passes.
If you have questions about contributing, please ask on the Unitary Foundation Discord. Check out the DEVELOPMENT guide for instructions on setting up the environment.
The Jeff project is free and open source, released under the Apache License, Version 2.0.