Does anyone have a better solution for reading and writing half-precision float16? As far as I can find Mathematica does not support this at the moment or am I missing something?

Currently, I'm reading the data as "UnsignedInteger16" and then converting it to binary and calculating the floating point number, but this feels a bit cumbersome.

Int16ToFloat16 = Compile[{{int, _Integer, 0}},
   Block[{bin, sign, imp, inf, exp, frac, signb, expb, fracb},

    bin = IntegerDigits[int, 2, 16];
    (*sign bit*)
    signb = bin[[1]];
    (*exponent bits*)
    expb = bin[[2 ;; 6]];
    (*fraction/significand bits *)
    fracb = bin[[7 ;; 16]];

    (*check exponent*)
    imp = Max[expb];
    inf = Min[expb];

    (*Calculate sign exponent and signinficant*)
    sign = (-1.)^signb;
    exp = ({16, 8, 4, 2, 1} . expb) - 15.;
    frac = ({512, 256, 128, 64, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1} . fracb)/1024;

    (*calculate the number*)
    If[imp === 0(*exp = 00000*), sign  (2.^-14.) frac,
     If[inf === 1(*exp = 11111*), 0.(*make ininfity and NaN 0*), 
      sign (2.^exp) (1 + frac)]
     ]
    ], RuntimeAttributes -> {Listable}, RuntimeOptions -> "Speed"];

the file can be found here

list = BinaryReadList["positions.3.float16", "UnsignedInteger16"]; // AbsoluteTiming
Dimensions@list
Int16ToFloat16@list[[1 ;; 10000]]; // RepeatedTiming
Int16ToFloat16[list]; // AbsoluteTiming

The list contains around 40M numbers, reading the binary file takes less than a second but converting it to float more than 10.

For storage, I'm just writing it as a float32 but this doubles the file size and the precision is not needed.