- The Catalyst quantum compiler for PennyLane accidentally supports pure classical JAX code, compiling it to MLIR and LLVM without quantum instructions.
- The team chose JAX because it can trace Python functions, supports NumPy and SciPy APIs, and lowers to MLIR, while adding native Python control flow and dynamic shapes.
- The goal was to compile entire hybrid quantum-classical workflows into standalone executables, not just quantum instructions.
- Catalyst bypasses XLA, lowering JAX representations directly to standard MLIR dialects and then to LLVM, enabling use of LLVM tools like Enzyme for backpropagation.