You just install it.

> learning a little C and potentially fixing an up-to-date and beloved library

A romantic thought, but 99% of the time I'm just going to do a workaround or a local patch.

I don't use Java anymore, but I don't hate it. I think it has some verbose conventions, but I vastly prefer it to C's extremely terse conventions.

Nowadays I try to do as much in TypeScript as I can, because I find it a pleasure to use, and it has the same property where you can dive into any lib when debugging.