Handling circuit conversions without explicit dependencies about mitiq HOT 5 CLOSED

This is a great point. It also comes up in the defaults which currently does do type checking. I also agree that Option 2 would be best.

One approach could be to branch off of the string name of the class e.g.

qc = qiskit.QuantumCircuit(...)

if type(qc).__name__ == 'QuantumCircuit':
    # convert to cirq

Likely it would be best to wrap this in a is_qiskit(qc) -> bool function that we can use modularly and change if there need to be a different method. For example if some other library decides to call their base program object "QuantumCircuit".

Do you think this will work @rmlarose ?

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A related issue, though not necessarily an urgent one, is how to do type signatures when we don't want to explicitly import the libraries. Also in the docs the Union stuff looks pretty ugly.

I'll open a discussion issue on this at #84

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Not sure if it is useful but with:
qc.__module__
you can get the parent module if necessary: `'qiskit.circuit.quantumcircuit' .

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Excellent suggestion @andreamari That's definitely the way to go.

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Thanks a bunch @willzeng and @andreamari for the suggestions. I will try to get Option 2 working with these ideas.

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