Inconsistent treatment of load() from relative path

[Mercerenies]

Tested versions

• Reproducible in: Godot Engine v4.2.1.stable.official (b09f793)
• Reproducible in: Godot Engine v4.02.stable.official (7a0977c)
• Reproducible in: Godot Engine v3.5.stable.official (991bb6a)

System information

Fedora Linux 37 (Workstation Edition) - X11 - GLES3 (Compatibility) - Mesa Intel(R) UHD Graphics 620 (WHL GT2) () - Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8565U CPU @ 1.80GHz (8 Threads)

Issue description

Godot seems to treat relative paths in load() calls very inconsistently. From the documentation for method load,

Important: The path must be absolute. A relative path will always return null.

So I would fully expect load("./SomeScript.gd") to return null. However, it seems to do a sort of secondary load and produces a bizarre object distinct from load("res://SomeScript.gd"). See reproduction steps below.

Steps to reproduce

Define a script file called SomeScript.gd whose contents are

extends RefCounted # extends Reference on Godot 3

Then define the main scene Main.gd

extends Node2D

const SomeScript = preload("res://SomeScript.gd")

# Called when the node enters the scene tree for the first time.
func _ready():
    # These two lines print the same
    print(load("res://SomeScript.gd"))
    print(load("res://SomeScript.gd"))
    # These two lines print the same, but distinct from the above.
    print(load("./SomeScript.gd"))
    print(load("./SomeScript.gd"))

    print(SomeScript.new() is SomeScript)  # true
    print(load("res://SomeScript.gd").new() is SomeScript)  # true
    print(load("./SomeScript.gd").new() is SomeScript)  # false

Based on the documentation, I would expect the load("./SomeScript.gd") lines to return null. However, if that's not correct, then I would expect them to return the same object as load("res://SomeScript.gd"). Currently, the two different load calls return distinct and incompatible objects, which just creates confusion.

Minimal reproduction project (MRP)

LoadBug.zip

[AThousandShips]

This is because of a minor issue probably, the path is converted to res://./SomeScript.gd, which is likely cached differently, can see about a fix for that part, it likely needs a normalisation of the path

The documentation should be clarified as well

[AThousandShips]

The documentation should probably be updated to say instead that:
Relative paths will be prefixed with res:// and not relative to the script it is called from.

Or similar

[Mercerenies]

@AThousandShips That was my first thought as well, since (during the course of debugging this issue) I noticed that Godot prints the path as res://./SomeScript.gd even if the res:// wasn't there in the load() call. But if you explicitly load res://./SomeScript.gd (with the res://), then everything actually works. You get one consistent object, and the is checks pass like they should. The problem only occurs if the res:// is missing from the load() call.

[AThousandShips]

Indeed, see the linked issue, it's due to a specific path, this ensures that the loaded object is the exact same instance