there is no good reason to wait to find and process the plural rules
for a translated message file until a gettext form requesting plural
rule processing is used. it just imposes additional synchronization,
here in the form of clunky use of atomics.
it looks like there may also have been a race condition where nplurals
could be seen without plural_rule being seen, possibly leading to null
pointer dereference. if so, this commit fixes it.