This is closer to what I was doing

#! perl -slw
use strict;
use Benchmark qw[ cmpthese ];
use List::Util qw[ first ];

our @array = 1 .. 100_000;

cmpthese( -1, {
    func_10th => q[ 
        my $first = first{ length > 3 } @array;
#        print "F:$first";
    ],
    iter_10th => q[
        my $first;
        for ( @array ) {
            next unless length > 3;
            $first = $_;
            last;
        }
#        print "I:$first";
    ],
    func_last => q[ 
        my $first = first{ length > 5 } @array;
#        print "F:$first";
    ],
    iter_last => q[
        my $first;
        for ( @array ) {
            next unless length > 5;
            $first = $_;
            last;
        }
#        print "I:$first";
    ],
});
__END__
P:\test>381208
            Rate func_last iter_last func_10th iter_10th
func_last 22.0/s        --      -16%      -98%      -99%
iter_last 26.1/s       18%        --      -98%      -99%
func_10th 1196/s     5336%     4488%        --      -56%
iter_10th 2706/s    12201%    10282%      126%        --
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