Yes, it's quite common for Elixir libraries to provide blocking calls. If your program is well-designed though, the calling process will be "blocked" but other

Yes, it's quite common for Elixir libraries to provide blocking calls. If your program is well-designed though, the calling process will be "blocked" but other processes will be executing at the same time. So having a process waiting on a HTTP call has no impact on the overall performance of the system. This is one of the big reasons why Erlang/Elixir's model of having many processes is awesome. It's also very easy to use the async/await pattern if you want to make a call, do other work, and get the data from the call at some later point.