Missing instructions for developing and using c3-toolset with Apple Silicon

[lazyoracle]

Describe the bug

There are no clear guidelines on how to go about installing or setting up a development environment on Apple Silicon devices eg, the M1 Macbook.

To Reproduce

• pip install c3-toolset fails on Apple Silicon due to missing dependencies
• Instructions for setup provided in CONTRIBUTING.md also do not work

Expected behavior

Straightforward way to install or setup dev machine on Apple Silicon

Screenshots

N/A

Environment (please complete the following information)

• OS: macOS 12.1 Monterey (M1 Macbook Pro 13 inch 2020)
• Python Version: 3.8
• c3-toolset Version: 1.4

Additional context

Why do we care about Apple Silicon?

Mostly, because of performance. Here are some crude benchmarks (SHA: af38dae) using:

• the full c3-toolset test suite invoked with pytest test/
• the optimization of a two-qubit entangling gate with jupyter nbconvert --to notebook --execute --inplace examples/two_qubit_entangling_gate.ipynb

Architecture	OS	Configuration	Test suite	Entangling gate
x86_64	GNU/Linux	24 cores (2x AMD Ryzen 9 3900X) at 2.8GHz, 128 GiB RAM	457 s	448 s
x86_64	macOS 12.1	2019 Macbook Pro 13-in, 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7, 16 GiB RAM	395 s	440 s
arm64	macOS 12.1	2020 Macbook Pro 13-in, Apple M1 Chip, 16 GiB RAM	128 s	169 s

Suggested development setup

1. Install Miniforge on your Apple Silicon Mac (https://github.com/conda-forge/miniforge)
2. Create a new conda environment (conda create --name=c3-dev python=3.8)
3. Install the latest tensorflow from conda-forge conda install tensorflow -c conda-forge
4. Install the corresponding version of tensorflow-probability that matches the version of tensorflow
5. Install separately the different qiskit submodules (instead of the metapackage) Ref: Install qiskit in ci env Qiskit/qiskit#1201
6. Use pip to install the rest of the requirements from the requirements.txt file after relaxing all the pinned versions
7. Edit the setup.py file to remove all the dependencies under install_requires=
8. Install c3-toolset in development mode using pip install -e .

[lazyoracle]

As of December 27, 2021 the following steps should create an all-inclusive development setup on Apple Silicon Macs with slightly less trouble:

1. Setup miniforge from here.
2. Get the required conda environment file by running wget https://gist.githubusercontent.com/lazyoracle/d62f535787605d85019d5ecf649a11ab/raw/environment-c3-dev-m1.yml.
3. Run conda env create -f environment-c3-dev-m1.yml to create a new conda environment.