eval qq{ use $module_name }; die "can't $module_name because: $@";

Then perl does all the "finding it" magic ... and you still get to decide the module name at run time...

You could also loop over many alternate modules and ignore failures until you find one you want, but for that you might want Module::Find or similar too ...

use Module::Find qw[ useall ];
my @plugins = useall q/Foo::Bar/;
for my $plugin_name (@plugins) {

        eval qq/require $plugin_name/;
        my $plugin = $plugin_name->new();

}
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