distutils sure knows how to build .o or .so files, but I don’t know about standalone executables (because I don’t know how the .o end up making an executable).  If you want to try to do it, I would advise you not to use the config command but rather a compiler object directly.  distutils.ccompiler.new_compiler() should give you an instance of a subclass of distutils.ccompiler.CCompiler suitable for your system, and then you can use help or the source to find what methods to call.