I have found that pragma 'use vars' is very slowly and many standart modules spend significant time at startup on 'use vars'.
Yes, I know about 'our' and I like it. But, how about perl 5.005_03?
So I make my own much faster variant, which can be easily converted to module. And if you name this module "vars.pm" and place it in, say, ".lib/" then you can obtain speed improvements in code like this:

BEGIN { unshift @INC, ".lib/"; }
use DBI;
use CGI;
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Update:Of course, if you create vars.pm from my example, sub "vars" must be named "import" to work. Thanx to ariels.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

sub vars (@) {
    package vars;
    my ($pkg, %type, $type, $name) = caller()."::";
    ($type, $name) = unpack("aa*",$_),
        push @{$type{$type}}, $name for @_;
    no strict 'refs';
    *{$pkg.$_} = \${$pkg.$_} for @{$type{'$'}};
    *{$pkg.$_} = \@{$pkg.$_} for @{$type{'@'}};
    *{$pkg.$_} = \%{$pkg.$_} for @{$type{'%'}};
}

BEGIN { vars qw( $VERSION $var ) }
$var = 5;
print __PACKAGE__,"\n",$var,"\n";
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