What is the fastest or most elegant way to compute a set difference using Javascript arrays?

if don't know if this is most effective, but perhaps the shortest

A = [1, 2, 3, 4];
B = [1, 3, 4, 7];

diff = A.filter(function(x) { return B.indexOf(x) < 0 })

console.log(diff);

Updated to ES6:

A = [1, 2, 3, 4];
B = [1, 3, 4, 7];

diff = A.filter(x => !B.includes(x) );

console.log(diff);

Well, 7 years later, with ES6's Set object it's quite easy (but still not as compact as python's A - B), and reportedly faster than indexOf for large arrays:

console.clear();
let a = new Set([1, 2, 3, 4]);
let b = new Set([5, 4, 3, 2]);


let a_minus_b = new Set([...a].filter(x => !b.has(x)));
let b_minus_a = new Set([...b].filter(x => !a.has(x)));
let a_intersect_b = new Set([...a].filter(x => b.has(x))); 

console.log([...a_minus_b]) // {1}
console.log([...b_minus_a]) // {5}
console.log([...a_intersect_b]) // {2,3,4}

You can use an object as a map to avoid linearly scanning B for each element of A as in user187291's answer:

function setMinus(A, B) {
    var map = {}, C = [];

    for(var i = B.length; i--; )
        map[B[i].toSource()] = null; // any other value would do

    for(var i = A.length; i--; ) {
        if(!map.hasOwnProperty(A[i].toSource()))
            C.push(A[i]);
    }

    return C;
}

The non-standard toSource() method is used to get unique property names; if all elements already have unique string representations (as is the case with numbers), you can speed up the code by dropping the toSource() invocations.