As for performance: Array.indexOf in the worse case(element is not there), will have to check all values of the array to check if the valusvalue is in it. And doing this for all values of the second array, means O(n * m) where n is the arr1 size and m is the arr2 size. If n = m, we can consider that it takes O(n*n), which is quite costlyexpensive. You could improve this by orderingsorting both arrays and doing a smarter check, but even that will have the cost of the sorting, which is O(n * log n) with a good implementation
Having said all that, what you really want is a structure to check if you have seen or not an element that can check it really quick. In javascript, we can use objets to do this. As its native code we don´t really know the complexity of access, but with testing a bit it is clear that it´s much better (in theory access should be O(1) or O(log n))
The pseudo code is like this:
var seen = {}
iterate all map1 values and mark is as seen
iterate all map2 values and unmark if already seen, mark if not
add all seen values to new array
return array
And here is a full fiddle:
function diffArray(arr1, arr2) {
var newArr = [];
arr1.map(function(val){
arr2.indexOf(val) < 0 ? newArr.push(val) : '';
});
arr2.map(function(val){
arr1.indexOf(val) < 0 ? newArr.push(val) : '';
});
return newArr;
}
function diffArray2(arr1,arr2){
seen = {}
var newArr = []
arr1.forEach(function(val){
seen[val] = true
})
arr2.forEach(function(val){
if(seen[val]){
delete seen[val]
}else{
seen[val] = true
}
})
for(var val in seen){
newArr.push(val)
}
return newArr
}
var arr1 = []
var arr2=[]
var mx = 10000;
for(var i=0;i<mx;i++){
arr1.push(i)
arr2.push(i+Math.round(mx/2))
}
console.time("diffArray with arrays and .index")
diffArray(arr1,arr2);
console.timeEnd("diffArray with arrays and .index")
console.time("diffArray with object")
diffArray2(arr1,arr2);
console.timeEnd("diffArray with object")