Quirk-E is an open-source quantum circuit simulator built as an extended version of the original Quirk [1] platform. Quirk-E has been developed as part of the Developer Experience in Iterative Quantum Software Engineering (DEQSE) project by the Empirical Software Engineering Research Team and the QIC Team at the University of Jyvaskyla in Finland.
The Quirk-E tool, which is presented in [2], adds more functionalities to the Quirk [1] quantum circuit simulator.
Quirk-E is free-to-use and to modify. However, you must add references [1] and [2] in case of any publication/production/execution/etc.
Quirk-E is also embedded in the DEQSE Visual Studio Code Extension [3], designed to enhance the quantum software development experience. The extension is available for download from GitHub and Visual Studio Marketplace.
Access Quirk-E via:
-
Web Browser: quirk-e.dev
-
DEQSE Visual Studio Code Extension: GitHub Repository | Visual Studio Marketplace
This work was supported by the Research Council of Finland [grant number 349945].
- Dependencies have been updated resolving several vulnerabilities caused by out-of-date packages.
- Right-Click menu for gates is added. It has "Duplicate" and "Delete" options.
- Probability distribution histogram is added.
- Output state visualization and copying is implemented below the histogram.
- Dark and light modes are added for enhancing the developer experience. These settings can be changed in the UI Settings menu.
- Multi-colored, yellow-colored, and black & white UI coloring options are available to take into account different user needs and use cases. These settings can be changed in the UI Settings menu.
- UI enhancements are made in order to make developer experience better. Dialogs and buttons have a unified style across the simulator interface.
- Drag and drop barrier (Slicer) for quantum circuits, enabling precise control over circuit execution flow by defining explicit synchronization points.
- Download option for downloading an image of the circuit is added, currently supporting PNG, JPEG, SVG, WebP, and PDF.
- Import functionality for importing circuits from other formats is added. Import currently supports Quirk-E JSON, OpenQASM 2.0, QUIL 2.0, Qiskit Qobj, and IonQ (JSON).
- Export functionality for exporting circuits to other formats is added. Export currently supports OpenQASM 2.0, Qiskit, PyQuil, Quil, Cirq, QuEST, QSharp, Qobj, Tensorflow Quantum, and Braket.
- Inspector allows user to control the flow of the circuit by playing it step by stepping, stepping between individual steps, and skipping to the beginning or end state of the circuit.
- Some vulnerable dependencies still remain due to some developer dependencies having vulnerable versions of
lodashandtraceuras sub-dependencies.
Clone the repository.
git clone https://github.com/DEQSE-Project/Quirk-E
cd Quirk-E
npm install
npm run
npm run build
Confirm the output works by opening out/quirk.html with a web browser.
- Samuel Ovaskainen (@0wsk) - University of Jyvaskyla
- Majid Haghparast (@MajidHaghparast) - University of Jyvaskyla
- Ronja Heikkinen (@ronjahoo) - University of Jyvaskyla
- Julian Fuchs (@julian-fuchs) - University of Jyvaskyla, Hasso Plattner Institute / University of Potsdam
Majid Haghparast <[email protected]>
[1] Craig Gidney. Quirk: A drag-and-drop quantum circuit simulator in the browser. 2017. Available at: https://algassert.com/quirk Github: https://github.com/Strilanc/Quirk
[2] Haghparast, M., Heikkinen, R., Ovaskainen, S., Fuchs, J., Jokinen, J. P., & Mikkonen, T. (2025). Quirk-E Quantum Circuit Simulator: Integrated Tool for Quantum Algorithm Development. SoftwareX, Accepted, In Press.
[3] Haghparast, M., Heikkinen, R., Ovaskainen, S., Fuchs, J., Jokinen, J. P., & Mikkonen, T. (2025). DEQSE Quantum IDE Extension: Integrated Tool for Quantum Software Engineering. arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.22843.