Early public release. The instruction set, binary format, and public API may still change before v1.0. Production use is not recommended yet.

XQuad is a hardware-agnostic toolchain for expressing and running quadratic optimization problems (QUBO / Ising / discrete) across quantum annealers and classical solvers. It ships as three Rust crates plus five Python distributions built around a single virtual-machine specification.

Think of it as LLVM for quadratic models — a common intermediate representation that lets you write a problem once and retarget it to any supported backend.

• Spec-first. Every behaviour is nailed down in spec/xqvm/SPEC.md and cross-implementation parity is mechanically enforced: every committed conformance vector runs on both the Rust production VM (xqvm) and the Python reference VM (xqvm_py) in CI; disagreement fails the build.
• Embeddable. The Rust core supports no_std + alloc, so the same VM runs inside WASM runtimes, Substrate pallets, and native binaries.
• Interactive. The Python umbrella (xquad) is REPL and Jupyter-friendly: load a program once, run it with different calldata, inspect outputs by slot. Low-level FFI lives in xqffi; user-facing Program / Session / RunResult live in xquad.program.

Install

Rust (from crates.io)

cargo install xqcli           # gives you the `xquad` binary

Python (from PyPI)

pip install xquad             # umbrella — full pipeline
# or pick individual pieces:
pip install xqffi xqcp xqsa   # FFI bindings + DSL + solvers

Package map

Three Rust crates on crates.io:

Crate	Binary	Description
xqvm	–	X-Quadratic Virtual Machine interpreter, bytecode codec, opcode table (no_std + alloc)
xqasm	–	.xqasm text-format assembler
xqcli	xquad	Unified CLI — xquad run / asm / dsm

Five Python distributions on PyPI:

Package	Description
xqffi	PyO3 FFI bindings for xqvm + xqasm (xqffi.vm, xqffi.asm)
xqvm_py	Pure-Python reference VM (conformance oracle)
xqcp	Constraint-programming DSL that compiles to .xqasm
xqsa	Solver adapters (dwave-samplers; pluggable solver interface)
xquad	Umbrella meta-package with interactive Program / Session / RunResult API

The one Rust package without a crates.io artefact is the xqffi pyo3 crate itself — it ships as the xqffi PyPI wheel rather than a reusable Rust library.

Quick start

A minimal program (CLI)

; add.xqasm — push two integers and add them
PUSH 10
PUSH 32
ADD
HALT

xquad asm add.xqasm -o add.xqb && xquad run add.xqb

End-to-end (Python, via the umbrella)

The recommended user-facing surface is xquad.program.Program + Session + RunResult. Load once, run many times with different calldata, inspect outputs by slot:

from xquad.program import Program

program = Program.from_source("""
PUSH 0
INPUT r0
PUSH 1
INPUT r1
LOAD r0
LOAD r1
ADD
STOW r2
PUSH 0
OUTPUT r2
HALT
""")

session = program.session(output_slots=1)
session.set_calldata([40, 2])
result = session.run()
assert dict(result.outputs) == {0: 42}

Program.load(bytes) takes wire-format bytecode; Session.run() returns a RunResult with dict-keyed outputs (unset slots present as None), residual stack, and step count. See docs/python-api-walkthrough.md for the full tour.

Low-level / conformance surface

For conformance harnesses and one-shot execution, the raw xqffi.vm.Vm is still available directly:

from xqffi.asm import assemble_source
from xqffi.vm import Vm

bytecode = assemble_source(src)
v = Vm()
v.set_calldata([40, 2])
v.set_output_slots(1)
v.run(bytecode)
assert v.outputs() == [42]

The xquad.vm.VM class offers a middle tier — a unified wrapper with backend dispatch (VMBackend.RUST / VMBackend.PYTHON) that accepts .xqasm source and normalises types across the two interpreters.

End-to-end worked example

examples/tsp/ shows a full Travelling Salesman Problem driven from the xqcp DSL through the VM and xqsa solver, runnable on either the Python reference VM or the Rust VM:

uv run --no-sync python examples/tsp/runner.py --seed 42
uv run --no-sync python examples/maxcut/runner.py --seed 42 --interpreter rust

# Run every example on both interpreters, diff against golden.json:
make example-smoke

Architecture

XQuad is a stack-based interpreter with a 256-slot register file. Registers hold typed values — integers, integer vectors, QUBO/Ising models (XqmxModel), and candidate solutions (XqmxSample). A dedicated loop stack drives RANGE/ITER iteration.

The opcode table is declared once in xqvm/src/bytecode/types/table.rs via the opcodes! x-macro; conformance/opcodes.yaml is the machine-readable mirror that all three representations (YAML, Rust macro, xqvm_py.opcodes) are checked against at build time and in CI (scripts/check-opcode-parity.py).

The binary format is a bare instruction stream — no header, no constant pool — just an opcode byte followed by its operands in big-endian byte order.

See docs/bytecode-semantics.md for instruction-by-instruction semantics and spec/xqvm/SPEC.md for the normative spec.

Development

Prerequisites

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh   # stable Rust
make deps                                                          # dev tools

Local setup

make xquad

This syncs the Python workspace (xqvm_py, xqcp, xqsa, xqffi, xquad) into .venv/, builds the xqffi pyo3 extension via maturin, writes a workspace .pth so scripts anywhere in the repo can import xqcp / xqsa / xqvm_py / xqffi / xquad naturally, and installs the xquad CLI binary under ~/.cargo/bin/.

Open a REPL with everything ready:

make repl

CI-equivalent locally

make all          # fmt + lint + test (what CI runs)
make conformance  # cross-impl parity suite (Rust + Python)

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for the development workflow, commit conventions, and DCO sign-off requirements. Agent guidelines for AI coding assistants are in AGENTS.md; cutting a release is documented in RELEASING.md.

License

Licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 or later.