FWIW, I recently came across the term here:
http://schneide.wordpress.com/tag/liquid-lock/
I explained that in another post a few minutes ago, and yes, this is it.
Maybe i should write an article on that, I though it was more well known.
The main problem here is the object the lock is acquired upon: the
reference of lastMessage is mutable! We call this a liquid lock, because
the lock isn’t as solid as it should be. It’s one of the more hideous
multithreading pitfalls as it looks like everything’s fine at first
glance.
You should try to name the real root of the bug.
It's trying to serialize access to a channel by locking the messages.
There is nothing fancy about this, it has nothing to do with mutability
it's just about locking the wrong resource.
