Just today I looked at how VITA community cooks their harfbuzz, so I copied the approach described in https://github.com/vitasdk/packages/issues/300, and it works really well: got SDL2-ttf sample (in C) built linking to harfbuzz, but not stdc++. Previously, I only built Jokr (written in C++) with it, so linking to stdc++ didn't bother me that much.
Just today I looked at how VITA community cooks their harfbuzz, so I copied the approach described in https://github.com/vitasdk/packages/issues/300, and it works really well: got SDL2-ttf sample (in C) built linking to harfbuzz, but not stdc++. Previously, I only built Jokr (written in C++) with it, so linking to stdc++ didn't bother me that much.