I haven't seen anything recently, but there's been a lot of testing in the past which should still be relevant.
For the most part, using things that aren't weapons as weapons is pretty inefficient. Socks, helmets, and similar small things don't really do enough damage to be useful. Furniture and the like might do a lot of damage but it'll make you/your dwarves so slow that you'll die before you get a chance to swing.
The only real exception is stuff like forks and carving knives. These aren't technically weapons, but they have very low contact areas, making them excellent stabbing weapons. Unfortunately they're kinda hard to come by in fort mode, so outfitting your military with masterwork steel forks probably isn't going to happen.
Mauls are basically just bigger, slower warhammers. Nothing fancy there. They're also too big for dwarves to use, much like pikes, halberds, and 2h swords, among others.
Whips are devastating. Not so much since the 2014 update, admittedly, but still are quite powerful. They deal blunt damage, which coupled with ridiculously low contact area means that they can often shatter bones even through a lot of armour.
If you can import enough whips to outfit a squad or three, you won't regret doing it.
Foreign weapons tend to do basically what existing weapons do. Except in the case of whips, there's no advantage to using them over stuff you produce yourself. Especially considering you can train up weaponsmiths to produce masterful/exceptional stuff pretty reliably, and (usually) have better materials available.