Ryan Grout

I'm not super familiar with wrapping GDAL calls, but is there any sort of cleanup needed for the GDAL objects allocated to avoid memory leaks?

Is there a situation where you wouldn't want the RAT represented as a numpy array? If the RAT is returned as two dictionaries: ``` table = {'column1': values1, 'column2':values2, ...}...

@ebkurtz A lot has changed since that discussion. Numpy is now integrated much more tightly into rasterio and is a required dependency. For example, `_io.pyx` already imports numpy.

I think using a numpy structured array might be a better alternative to new custom classes in rasterio. https://numpy.org/doc/2.2/user/basics.rec.html

My experiments with structured arrays seem to indicate easy field access. The array is 1D and stored row oriented, but it's easy to slice fields/columns. For example: ```python rat_dtype =...

One advantage of the custom class is that the RAT can be lazily read/written. Perhaps that is a desirable characteristic. Slightly increases the complexity but with the benefit of not...