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Do .elc files take precedence over .el files when using load?
Say I have two files in my load path: foo.el and foo.elc. If I call (load "foo"), will the byte-compiled version (foo.elc) always be loaded instead of the uncompiled foo.el?
By default the .elc would be loaded rather than the .el, as noted in the other answers/comments.
A few things can affect this behavior, however:
Set load-prefer-newer to t if you want to load whichever file is newer. In that case the .el will be loaded if it has been modified more recently than the corresponding .elc file.
See the variable load-suffixes, which defines the suffixes that load will try, in order of preference.
Yes, .elc files take precedence over .el files, even if they both exist in your load path.
According to emacswiki.org:
When both a byte-compiled file (.elc) and a source file (.el) are found for the same library, preference is given to byte-compiled file.
load-prefer-newer, which can customize this behavior.