TL;DR: if you're not retired before QC becomes useful (which is likely), the "API" will have changed so much from now till then that you shouldn't worry about i

TL;DR: if you're not retired before QC becomes useful (which is likely), the "API" will have changed so much from now till then that you shouldn't worry about it. Think of this as an algorithm on specific hardware for solving a specific problem. You can encode other problems into the specific problem, at a cost. Currently this algorithm on specific hardware is not as fast as state-of-the art algorithms on ordinary hardware (namely Selby's). But the people making this special hardware claim (no proof) that when the special hardware (and the problem size) is scaled up, the special hardware will be much faster than ordinary hardware. So far no-one has disproved this assertion, but no-one has proven or demonstrated it either. Meanwhile, many other scientists and some companies, who refer to this type of special hardware as "dirty QC", are working on another class of special hardware they call "clean QC". This is mathematically proven to be much faster than ordinary hardware when it is scaled up, but it's very very very difficult to scale it up. But they're working on it and showing progress. Right now, no-one knows if the "dirty" or the "clean" special hardware will be the first to be actually useful in the real world. It's likely the first useful real world application is more than ten years away. We don't know exactly what the application will be, or how the special hardware then will be programmed. It's also quite likely that most the people commenting here will be retired before access to the special hardware will be given to anyone but scientists.