RFC: Migrating physical dialect to bloqade-circuit

[johnzl-777]

For some context, there is an existing dialect called physical hosted elsewhere that contains additional statements to define detectors and observables (literally SetDetector and SetObservable) that can then produce stim's INCLUDE_OBSERVABLE and DETECTOR annotations via existing code generation infrastructure.

It would be useful to have these statements in bloqade-circuit to enable more QEC functionality and would have the added benefit of cutting down on duplicate infrastructure in other projects (one could just dependent on circuit directly instead of having a slightly different version of passes floating around).

To kill two birds with one stone, @cduck has pointed out physical is not a great name and should be changed. So, if the migration is agreed upon then we should also consider a more fitting name

This requested was pitched by @rafaelha originally and I am in favor of it.

[david-pl]

Just to be clear: this should, effectively, be the gemini.physical dialect, correct? Should we move it under that namespace?
Also, I think pre-fixing it with gemini makes it much clearer than just physical, so I'd propose the "name change" to gemini.physical.

[johnzl-777]

Yes, that could work although I suppose I thought perhaps another idea is to alias it to gemini but keep it independent under a separate name, like "annotate"? (I'm taking the original Stim name for that particular set of statements).

The only reason I think this way is that it might imply other physical operations (like gates) when all we really want is the detector and observable statements

[david-pl]

Oh, I see. So then gemini.physical should be a group that includes this specific physical dialect and the ones specified in #530 ?

[rafaelha]

I also like the name annotate for this dialect, since that's what detector and observable statements are: a circuit annotations that are helpful for the decoder.

[johnzl-777]

Per today's meeting:

• physical will be renamed to annotate
• we'll only bring in the SetDetector and SetObservable statements for now. I'll bring in the pass infrastructure that allows SetDetector and SetObservable to be converted to stim too for completeness.