Learn and use Template and you will never need to learn another templating solution. Especially if you plan to have a "large" project, use the Template Toolkit.

One of the reasons to recommend TT is that it is so complete and so stable. What you write now will work in 10 years -- or 20!

Personally I have never been affected at all by any performance issues with TT. You can cache compiled templates where appropriate. And I've just never come close to the templating being the slow part of any app: almost always, DB access, network access, or disk access are going to be bottlenecks first.

Finally,as Discipulus recommends, you should use a modern framework for your project, since you are just starting out. Most modern web app frameworks will allow you to specify your templating engine: I strongly recommend using Dancer2 and specifying Template.

Hope this helps!