good news! i've figured out how to write wasm with rust and get it running in the browser, and i've got it playing nice with the html in the browser. neat!
bad news! wasm written in this way appears to be hugely bloated for a variety of reasons, and now i have to either figure out how to optimize, figure out how to do everything on a very low level- possibly both. suddenly i've got to pay a memory cost of many kb to send the word "pants" from js to wasm.
i guess it's not impossible to write all the game logic in my rust code to only use data types that map to wasm's data types, but it will be significantly less human readable. maybe the solution here is to write one version in a human readable format and then write some other program to pack that into wasm-friendly rust, but then i need to make sure that gets synchronized with the js and at that point i'm just recreating wasm-bindgen...