Microsoft announces Visual Studio for quantum computing

Like Visual Basic? You're gonna love VB for quantum computing!

With Moore's Law approaching its limits, Microsoft has joined the rush towards quantum computing by announcing a new programming language intended for newcomers to the field.

The tool was unveiled at Microsoft's Ignite conference this week.

Quantum computing has yet to take off, but has the potential to result in machines that can calculate thousands, perhaps even millions of times faster than the current generation.

Now, Microsoft has confirmed that the company will integrate a new language into Visual Studio, intended to work on both a quantum simulator and an actual quantum computer.

In a blog post, the company claims that it has been working on quantum computing for two decades and gives, as an example, that Cortana, Microsoft's AI voice assistant, could, theoretically have been trained in a day under a quantum computing environment, rather than a month.

To that end, the company is working on building a topological qubit. This is something of a challenge as the atmospheric requirements for a qubit alone are challenging enough. The slightest variance in temperature could see the quantum state dissolved.

The system is set to be available to preview, free of charge, by the end of the year and will come with libraries and tutorials to show developers interested in tackling tomorrow's computing challenges how to scale out a problem over 30-40 logical qubits, even though they don't yet exist.

"For the first time in 70 years we're looking at a way to build a computing system that is just completely different. It's not an incremental tune-up or improvement. It's a qualitatively different thing," said Richard Mundee, who has been working on Microsoft's Quantum gubbins for the past two decades.

Microsoft's play for quantum computing developers follows the open-sourcing of a development tool by quantum computing pioneer D-Wave in January this year.

The tool, called qbsolv, enables developers to build higher-level tools and applications based on quantum computing systems developed by D-Wave, without the need to (fully) understand the complex physics behind quantum computers.