Hi,

I noticed that during startup, emacs tries to load ~/.emacs (with
different extensions) many times over.  You can see this by using
strace and tracing the openat syscall.  The problem is, that `load'
does not expand the ~/ in the filename passed to it.  So it does not
recognize the file as being absolute and tries to resolve it using
the load-path.

While resolving the path in the openp function in lread.c,
`expand-file-name' is used with the default directory being the
elements of the load-path.  Since for `expand-file-name', ~/.emacs is
an absolute path, it returns the path unchanged, and load tries to
load ~/.emacs many times over.  I am not sure if the behavior of
`load' should also be considered a bug, but since all the other paths
of init files are resolved using `expand-file-name', I guess the same
should be done for the ~/.emacs path as well.

-- Christoph