I did a little work on this a while back - an LFS system is a good place to start. I was a little ambitious though - I wanted a pure C/python system with no shells (at all - just ipython) and no command scraping - just enough to start SSH and nginx.

It's a lot of work - I think I ended up trying to write an iproute2 replacement using ctypes and quit. I wonder if anyone else would be interested...