Quantum simulators based on either actual hardware or simulations on classical computers are now widely performed. Often these are digital or gate-level simulations are facilitated through the use of API’s such as IBM’s Qiskit, Google’s Cirq, Xanadu’s PennyLane, or Rigetti’s Forest. The majority of these API’s are built around Python.
These are easy to learn and use and even allow you to run actual code on the quantum cloud such as Amazon’s Braket.
An important emerging research area is combining quantum optimal control (QOC) with VQAs to enable pulse-level control of qubits to enter the cost landscape. This is now possible using Qiskit’s OpenPulse for example.