v2.12.0

Announcements

• There is now a Contributing Guide for those who would like to participate in the development of pyQuil. Check it out! In addition, pyQuil now has a Bug Report Template, and a Feature Request Template, which contain sections to fill out when filing a bug or suggesting an enhancement (@karalekas, gh-985, gh-986, gh-996).

Improvements and Changes

• The local_qvm context manager has been renamed to local_forest_runtime, which now checks if the designated ports are used before starting qvm/quilc. The original local_qvm has been deprecated (@sauercrowd, gh-976).
• The test suite for pyQuil now runs against both Python 3.6 and 3.7 to ensure compatibility with the two most recent versions of Python (@karalekas, gh-987).
• Add support for the FORKED gate modifier (@kilimanjaro, gh-989).
• Deleted the deprecated modules parameters.py and qpu.py (@karalekas, gh-991).
• The test suite for pyQuil now runs much faster, by setting the default value of the --use-seed option for pytest to True (@karalekas, gh-992).
• Support non-gate instructions (e.g. MEASURE) in to_latex() (@notmgsk, gh-975).
• Test suite has been updated to reduce the use of deprecated features (@kilimanjaro, gh-998, gh-1005).
• Certain tests have been marked as "slow", and are skipped unless the --runslow option is specified for pytest (@kilimanjaro, gh-1001).
• PauliSum objects can now be constructed from strings via from_compact_str() and PauliTerm.from_compact_str() supports multi-qubit strings (@jlbosse, gh-984).

Bugfixes

• Strength two symmetrization was not correctly producing orthogonal arrays due to erroneous truncation, which has been fixed (@kylegulshen, gh-990).
• The STORE instruction now accepts int or float in addition to MemoryReference as its source argument. As a result, you can now STORE an immediate value into a memory register. Also, the EQ, LT, LE, GT, and GE instructions now all accept float in addition to int or MemoryReference as their third and final argument. As a result, you can now perform classical comparisons against an immediate float value. Finally, the CONVERT instruction now accepts any valid memory reference designator (a MemoryReference, a string, or a tuple of type (str, int)) for both its arguments (@appleby, gh-1010).
• Raise an error if a gate with non-constant parameters is provided to lifted_gate (@notmgsk, gh-1012).