{"ID":2852226,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18557","arxiv_id":"2510.18557","title":"When Abstraction Breaks Physics: Rethinking Modular Design in Quantum Software","abstract":"Abstraction is a fundamental principle in classical software engineering, which enables modularity, reusability, and scalability. However, quantum programs adhere to fundamentally different semantics, such as unitarity, entanglement, the no-cloning theorem, and the destructive nature of measurement, which introduce challenges to the safe use of classical abstraction mechanisms. This paper identifies a fundamental conflict in quantum software engineering: abstraction practices that are syntactically valid may violate the physical constraints of quantum computation. We present three classes of failure cases where naive abstraction breaks quantum semantics and propose a set of design principles for physically sound abstraction mechanisms. We further propose research directions, including quantum-specific type systems, effect annotations, and contract-based module design. Our goal is to initiate a systematic rethinking of abstraction in quantum software engineering, based on quantum semantics and considering engineering scalability.","short_abstract":"Abstraction is a fundamental principle in classical software engineering, which enables modularity, reusability, and scalability. However, quantum programs adhere to fundamentally different semantics, such as unitarity, entanglement, the no-cloning theorem, and the destructive nature of measurement, which introduce cha...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18557","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.18557v2","authors":"[\"Jianjun Zhao\"]","published":"2025-10-21T12:08:58Z","proceeding":"cs.SE","tasks":"[\"cs.SE\",\"quant-ph\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}