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 programming, based on quantum semantics and considering engineering scalability.