19314, "lydia-duncan", "I/O: what should be done about the "kind" field on channels?", "2022-02-25T17:46:25Z"
The kind field on channels is used to indicate the default endianness. It is param today to give the compiler hints that might potentially help with performance, but it's unclear if there are actually any benefits from it. It is only useful when performing binary IO.
What should we do about this field? Should we replace it with a binary encoder/decoder? If we keep it, we should probably give it a better name, maybe "endianness"? If we keep it, it could be used as the default value for the related argument to readBinary and writeBinary.