I am always interested in what powers these tools under the hood. I had to learn the hard way, you do not write a program analysis tool from scratch, if you can help it. I know I have tried. It is too much for one person to do.

So what is powering this thing?

1. http://sawja.inria.fr/ This is a OCaml library for parsing .class files into OCaml datastructures. There is some built-in analysis it uses

2. Clang and LLVM which is the popular thing to build you C family analysis framework on.

I use https://github.com/Sable/soot for Java analysis myself. It is extremely powerful out of the box and can analyze: java source code, jvm bytecode and dalvik bytecode. I recommend taking a look at that if you are interested in that sort of thing.

The innovation in the released tool seems to be the incremental checking. Haven't had a lot of time to dig into that but that seems to be the important part. In general it is great that they created something useful and practical, that is always a challenge.