@7osema unfortunately i dont use Darktable, so i cannot tell you. But i saw good Darktable-edits from @apostel338 and @Thomas_Do in earlier plays. Maybe they can give you more information about highlight-recovery in darktable.
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Highlight-recovery is not a strength of darktable (yet). You can play with filmic reconstruct and/or try highlight reconstruction in LCh or color mode. I have also used the color reconstruction module with some success. But in this image some parts are massively clipped and the software can only “guess” the color from the surroundings or display the texture in grayscale. If you look carefully you see also some artefacts in the nice RT version of @marter .
But there are some ideas to improve highlight reconstruction in darktable. See for example here and here.
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Just using librtprocess would give dt all the RawTherapee goodness of its highlight recovery as well as most of its demosaic algorithms. That would also further concentrate the development focus on these two specialized image operations, to the benefit of all…
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Perhaps the NIH syndrome 
Question: who developed this color propagation function?
librtprocess is relatively recent, and dakrtable was around long before it was a thing.
NICE WORK sir!
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////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
//
// Highlight reconstruction
//
// copyright (c) 2008-2011 Emil Martinec <ejmartin@uchicago.edu>
// copyright (c) 2019 Ingo Weyrich <heckflosse67@gmx.de>
//
//
// code dated: June 16, 2011
// code dated: July 09, 2019, speedups by Ingo Weyrich <heckflosse67@gmx.de>
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