Google uncloaked its Go programming language little more than three years ago. But Derek Collison believes that if we give it just two more, it will be the dominant means of building the massive cloud computing systems that are so quickly changing the way the internet works.

That's a bold statement, but Collison is worth listening to. He helped build a set of online programming tools that drew more traffic than almost any other web service at Google, and later, at virtual server kingpin VMware, he oversaw the creation of Cloud Foundry, one of those massive cloud computing systems. He first made his prediction with a post to Twitter this past fall, and five months on, he very much stands by it.

"The management layers and infrastructure layers of the newer technologies that provide this cloud delivery model?" he tells Wired. "Within two years, a majority will be written in Go."

The movement is well under way. Collison's new company, Apcera, is building some sort of mystery cloud platform using Go. His old Cloud Foundry team recently rebuilt a portion of their platform with the Google language. Saleforce.com's Heroku has long used the language. And it has even popped up as far afield as Brazil, where Globo.com – the country's largest internet company – has used Go to build a Cloud Foundry-like tool called Tsuru.

Go was created at Google by veteran engineers Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson. Thompson is well known as the co-creator of Unix and the godfather of the C language. Pike later worked alongside him at Bell Labs. And Griesemer is best known for his work on the HotSpot compiler for the Java programming language. The trio built Go as a better way to build the massively distributed systems that underpin Google and other web operations.

"We realized that the kind of software we build at Google is not always served well by the languages we had available," Pike said in 2011. "Robert Griesemer, Ken Thompson, and myself decided to make a language that would be very good for writing the kinds of programs we write at Google."

The language is specifically designed for running many processes at the same time, but much like Thompson C language, it's also built for speed, giving you extreme control over how it uses the hardware running beneath it.

Although it's been criticized for taking the name of an existing programming language, it's also been praised by other language designers as well as systems developers – notably Collison. AZccording to research firm RedMonk, the language is slowly but steadily gaining in popularity in the open source community.

The Brazilian project Tsuru is very much indicative of the projects that are using the new language. Like Cloud Foundry and Heroku and Apcera, it's a means of building and hosting large applications that seeks to make life as easy as possible for software developers. It's what's commonly known as a "platform cloud" or "platform as a service." Go is ideal for these sorts of platforms because they are designed to run across many distributed machines.

What's more, Tsuru lets developers build applications using the Go language, much like another platform cloud, the Google App Engine. Derek Collison's bold prediction may not come to pass, but he's certainly looking in the right direction.

Cade Metz contributed to this story.