Development Guide

Development requirements

First and foremost, a python3.6 is needed to be installed on your machine. For the case of having a system python with version >=3.7, pyenv is recommended.

The eigen3 C++ library is needed to be installed for the thewalrus (dependency of strawberryfields).

The deb package is named libeigen3-dev, so issue

sudo apt-get install libeigen3-dev

on a machine running Fedora/CentOS (the rpm package is named eigen3-devel).

python3-venv is important for the python virtual environment, install it on linux with:

sudo apt install python3-venv

Additionally, this project uses tox to manage virtualenvs, install it with:

pip install tox

For packaging, poetry is used. Install it with the below command:

curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/python-poetry/poetry/master/get-poetry.py | python

poetry can be installed with pip as well, but the recommended way is to install it with the above command. More info here.

The last step is to run the below command to download all the python dependencies (more info here):

poetry install

Running a program with poetry

A python program can be run inside poetries virtual environment with the below command

poetry run python <python file>

Or the virtual environment can be activated explicitly by running:

source `poetry env info --path`/bin/activate

Testing

Run tests with

tox

How to contribute?

We plan out and track all Piquasso issues through GitLab Issues. Feel free to browse around and pick a sympathetic one to work on. Once you have it, then please:

1. Follow the feature branch workflow. In the commit message please refrence the issue with #issue-num.
2. Issue a merge request. The Git server will report back the URL for this after the push. You are also welcome to check out the merge requests and add comments to others' work there.
3. Anytime during the process you can add more changes to your new branch and push anew. If you do this, any approvals will be reset though, but its fine as the approval concerns the whole of the merge request, so your peers have to re-evaluate your work.
4. Every request needs to be accepted by at least one other developer. Once you have it, you can merge your change. If your change consists of multiple commits, please consider checking the Squash commit check-box for GitLab to make a single commit---this improves readability of master branch history.

Publish package to private gitlab repository

Register private repository

poetry config repositories.gitlab https://gitlab.inf.elte.hu/api/v4/projects/73/packages/pypi

Create Personal access tokens and put it in the below command

poetry config pypi-token.gitlab <my-token>

The above commands are based on these:

• https://gitlab.inf.elte.hu/help/user/packages/pypi_repository/index.md for the repository link used in the first command
• https://python-poetry.org/docs/repositories/#adding-a-repository for the commands.

Publish to the private repository

https://python-poetry.org/docs/libraries/#packaging

poetry build

https://python-poetry.org/docs/libraries/#publishing-to-a-private-repository

poetry publish -r gitlab

Benchmarking

We can run benckmarks with various pennylane devices, for more details see: https://github.com/XanaduAI/pennylane/blob/master/benchmark/README.rst For instance:

cd pennylane/benchmark/
poetry run python benchmark.py -d default.qubit time bm_entangling_layers

Notes:

Unfortunatelly running benchmark.py with bm_mutable_rotations or bm_mutable_complicated_params will not work. There is a bug in both of these in their __init__() function: they are expected to accept a named parameter qnode_type but they don't. If you add the parameter by hand it will work fine.

The benchmarks, as of now, only work for qubit operations!