In the NISQ-era, there is a wide variety of hardware manufacturers building quantum computers. Each of these companies may choose different approaches and hardware architectures for their machines. This poses a problem for quantum software engineering, as the retargetability of quantum programs across different hardware platforms becomes a non-trivial challenge. In response to this problem, various retargetable quantum compilers have been presented in the scientific literature. These promise the ability to compile software for different hardware platforms, enabling retargetability for quantum software. In this paper, we develop and apply a metric by which the retargetability of the quantum compilers can be assessed. We develop and run a study to analyze key aspects regarding the retargetability of the compilers Tket, Qiskit, and ProjectQ. Our findings indicate that Tket demonstrates the highest level of retargetability, closely followed by Qiskit, while ProjectQ lags behind. These results provide insights for quantum software developers in selecting appropriate compilers for their use-cases, and highlight areas for improvement in quantum compilers.

翻译：在NISQ时代，众多硬件制造商正在构建各异的量子计算机。这些公司可能为其设备选择不同的实现路径与硬件架构。这给量子软件工程带来了挑战，因为量子程序在不同硬件平台间的可重定向性已成为一项重要难题。针对此问题，科学文献中已涌现出多种可重定向量子编译器，它们承诺能够为不同硬件平台编译软件，从而实现量子软件的可重定向性。本文开发并应用了一种用于评估量子编译器可重定向性的度量标准。我们设计并开展了一项研究，用于分析Tket、Qiskit和ProjectQ这三种编译器在可重定向性方面的关键特性。研究结果表明，Tket展现出最高水平的可重定向性，Qiskit紧随其后，而ProjectQ则相对落后。这些发现为量子软件开发者根据具体应用场景选择合适的编译器提供了参考依据，同时揭示了量子编译器需要改进的方向。