# Contributing to the QDK Experimental Simulators

## Build prerequisites

The build for the experimental simulators requires the nightly Rust toolchain to be installed, along with support for clippy and rustfmt. These prerequisites can be installed by using the `prerequisites.ps1` script in this folder:

```pwsh
PS> ./prerequistes.ps1
```

## Code quality checks

The build for this crate enforces the following mandatory code quality checks:

- `rustfmt`: Check code style and formatting rules.
- `clippy`: Check for common programming errors and linter violations.
- `#[deny(missing_docs)]`: Require API documentation for all public crates, modules, traits, functions, and types.

## Testing strategy

Tests for the open systems simulator consist of five distinct parts:

- Rust-language unit tests for the Rust library.
  These tests are defined in `#[cfg(test)]` submodules of each module in `./src/`.
- Rust-language integration tests for the Rust library.
  These tests are defined in modules under the `./tests/` folder.
- Q#-language unit tests in the C#-based simulation runtime.
  These tests ensure that the binding of the Rust library works as expected when included into the C#-based runtime, and are defined in operations marked with `@Test("Microsoft.Quantum.Experimental.OpenSystemsSimulator")` under the `qsharp-runtime/src/Simulation/Simulators.Tests/QuantumTestSuite` folder.
- C#-language unit tests in the IQ# kernel.
  These tests ensure that noise models and noisy simulation can be correctly exposed to Python and Q# notebook users; please see the `microsoft/iqsharp` repo for more details.