from ... import ... behavior doesn't work for Q# libraries

Describe the bug The following code:

import qsharp
qsharp.packages.add("Microsoft.Quantum.Chemistry")
qsharp.reload()
from Microsoft.Quantum.Chemistry.JordanWigner.VQE import EstimateEnergy

throws this error:

ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'Microsoft'

Expected behavior I would expect to be able to use from ... import ... with libraries.

System information Running in iqsharp-based Docker container.

[guenp]

Yes indeed that’s what I was thinking, apologies for not being more clear. I like the approach you suggest as well especially because it’s much simpler. In line with your suggestion, instead of saving to a temp location we can indeed just compile directly. On top of that I was thinking to have a convenience function import_qsharp_operation or simply import_operation that abstracts away the part where you compile the Q# code:

import qsharp
estimate_energy_op = qsharp.import_operation(namespace="Microsoft.Quantum.Chemistry.JordanWigner.VQE", operation="EstimateEnergy")

where

def import_operation(namespace: str, operation: str):
   wrapper_code = qsharp.generate_wrapper(operation, namespace)
   return qsharp.compile(wrapper_code)

For the second use case of generating the boilerplate code, as per your suggestion I agree this could be a nice starting point if people want to tinker with the generated Q# code. If I understood correctly, are you suggesting something like this?

def generate_qsharp_program(operation: str, source_namespace: str, target_namespace: str, path: str = None):
   wrapper_code = qsharp.generate_wrapper(operation, source_namespace)
   entrypoint_code, project_code = qsharp.generate_project(source_namespace, target_namespace)
   save_files(entrypoint_code, project_code, path) # save the files at the given location or at current directory if path is None

[rmshaffer]

@guenp Thanks for the ping on this. So, this won’t directly solve the problem, but there is already code in IQ# for auto-generating Q# wrappers around an arbitrary Q# operation, which is similar to what you are proposing, I believe: https://github.com/microsoft/iqsharp/blob/249490833c5d4c0728c911eab796b7b22394ffd6/src/Core/Compiler/CompilerService.cs#L148-L168

We could consider exposing some functionality similar to that via Python. Do you have any thoughts on what a convenient way to consume this might look like?